New York politicians usually spend June competing to see who can wave the biggest rainbow flag. This year, Mayor Zohran Mamdani entered the contest early.
In a lengthy Pride Month message, Mamdani declared that “it would take far more than a month to honor the contributions of queer and transgender New Yorkers,” celebrating everyone from early transgender activists to the Stonewall movement and ACT UP. “To all our queer and trans neighbors: you deserve a City where you can afford to live safely, openly, and joyfully,” he wrote.
Fine. That’s standard-issue progressive politics in 2026.
But there is one rather uncomfortable question hanging over the mayor’s Pride celebration: How exactly does that square with the company he keeps?
Just days earlier, Mamdani became the first New York mayor in decades to skip the city’s annual Israel Day Parade, a decision that angered many Jewish New Yorkers and community leaders. While previous mayors viewed attendance as a basic gesture toward one of the city’s largest religious communities, Mamdani decided to stay away.
Yet somehow he has found no shortage of time for activists and figures whose records on LGBTQ issues are, to put it mildly, less than parade-friendly.
Mamdani campaigned with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, a controversial Brooklyn cleric who has publicly described homosexuality as a “disease of this society” and urged followers to “defend against these homosexuals.”
Those aren’t critics’ words. Those are the imam’s own words. Mamdani praised Wahhaj afterward as “one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders and a pillar of the Bed-Stuy community.”
Then there is the mayor’s documented appearance alongside Ugandan politician Rebecca Kadaga, who became internationally infamous after championing legislation imposing severe penalties on homosexuals and once described the measure as a “Christmas gift” to supporters. Again, not exactly the guest list at a Pride parade.
The contradictions don’t end there.
Throughout his political career, Mamdani has repeatedly faced scrutiny over associations with activists, organizations, and public figures accused by critics of extremism, antisemitism, or support for terrorist-linked causes. He has also been criticized for refusing to clearly answer questions about Hamas and for comments that opponents argue show a troubling pattern of moral ambiguity.
Whether voters agree with those criticisms is their choice. But they are impossible to ignore when the mayor spends the first day of Pride Month presenting himself as a champion of LGBTQ rights.
After all, New Yorkers are being asked to believe two things at once: That Pride is a defining moral cause. And that associations with people who have openly condemned homosexuality in extreme ways are somehow irrelevant.
That’s a difficult sell, even by modern political standards.
The irony becomes even harder to miss when viewed alongside Mamdani’s Israel parade boycott. The mayor skipped a longstanding event cherished by many Jewish New Yorkers. Yet he appears far less concerned about distancing himself from figures whose statements about gay people would trigger immediate outrage if uttered by almost anyone else in public life.
