report from saturday's protest

Hello, all. You may have noticed that the blog posts have not been coming at the frenetic pace that you may have come to expect based on the first half of November. That's mostly because my writing energy over the past week was sucked up by a 12-page paper for my critical studies class and a 15-20 page script for my short film class, both of which have now been turned in. By the way, if you ever have five hours to kill, I recommend watching Errol Flynn's They Died With Their Boots On (1941) back to back with Little Big Man (1970). I can't think of two other movies that treat the same historical events from such different political points of view, and I think I may have "Gary Owen" stuck in my head for the next week.

I did, of course, make time to attend Saturday's national day of protest against Prop 8. First of all, major shout-out to Jessica S., who of all my friends who said they might come was the only one who actually showed up--and gave me a ride :-). I have been going to these things out of some deep-seated activist reflex that apparently still lurks within me, not really caring whether anyone I knew was there. But it was definitely nice not to be protesting solo this time around.

The LA protest was in the 10,000-15,000 range, similar to last weekend's march in Silverlake. The awesome, festive, defiant atmosphere was still there and doesn't need repeating, so I'll only focus on the things I thought were important.

The organizers--who in LA seemed definitely to be from the "gay establishment"--wisely seemed to be making an effort to counter the destructive finger-pointing that cropped up right after the election, with some people trying to blame Blacks and Latinos for Prop 8's passage. The speaker list included the current head of the Southern Christian Leadership Council and several Latino speakers...including, oh yeah, Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles.

Now, I'm not all about elected officials, but when was the last time you heard of a mayor of a major city coming to speak at a protest? Add to that the fact that large sections of Southern California are currently on fire and LA County is under a state of emergency. (For those outside of Cali, the fires are not anywhere near me--although I can smell them when the wind blows.) This dude had every excuse not to show up for a bunch of gays, but he nevertheless landed in a helicopter and gave a bilingual speech before heading back to the fires. Which all things considered seems pretty cool. I'm sure it also accounts for the comedically light police presence, which amounted to about seven cops on bikes. Seriously, this is the LAPD, and they were so tame it was almost laughable.

After the rally there was a march through downtown and then something very interesting happened. We started marching into the middle of nowhere. Seriously, I still haven't quite worked out where we were going. We ended up in some hot, dusty park among a bunch of warehouses. It has been unseasonably hot in LA (hence the fires) and it was in the 90s on Saturday. Supposedly there was going to be another rally in this park at the end of the world, but I never found out, because the several-hundred-strong group of people we were with got fed up and decided to turn around and march back into the city. So a huge bunch of people just turned around and started marching back to City Hall.

The cops repeatedly told us that the streets had been reopened and that we needed to get on the sidewalk "for our own safety," but they really weren't trying that hard to stop us from going anywhere. There was one tense moment when a little pod of riot cops showed up and blocked a particular street, but the crowd just went the other way and they didn't really try to stop us.

At some point near City Hall, we were confronted by one of the "official" organizers, an older white dude with a megaphone. A brief shouting war broke out between this guy and some of the leaders of our protest pod, which was mostly young people and fairly multiracial. People were yelling "Why did we march to the middle of nowhere?" and this guy, who looked fairly unprepared for the situation, was asking us what we wanted to do.

The decision was finally made to march to Hollywood and Highland for...no reason in particular, as far as I can tell. The crowd had dwindled to less than 200 at that point, and Jessica and I decided to peace out since it was really hot and we'd had enough marching for one day. (On a small note of personal pride: although I was out in the blazing sun for at least four hours, I did *not* get seriously sunburnt. Go my pasty white skin!) But I thought this incident was interesting because it revealed several things.

One: people clearly want to do more than march in a circle. I've noticed that in LA, more than in other cities, it feels like you're marching in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps this is because of LA's epic failure as an example of urban planning--LA is more like a bunch of roads with a higher-than-average density of stuff lining them than an actual city. But clearly, there is a demand for action that feels more concrete. There is also clearly a real divide between different layers or sections of the movement, between the "gay establishment" that I talked about (the somewhat conservative, Democrat-sponsoring, non-profit-status-having, black-tie-fundraiser-hosting crowd from organizations like Equality California, the HRC and the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force), and a younger, less organized crowd that is more militant, more racially diverse, more gender-queer, less wealthy and less interested in assimilation.

These differences have always been present in the gay rights movement; they were painfully apparent when I organized with Marriage Equality New York in 2004. There were a lot of debates about "what kind of image we wanted to project"--essentially, what kind of gays we wanted to be. Underneath this were a lot of unspoken divisions along lines of race, class, gender expression, and politics. One manifestation of these debates was the argument by some people that we shouldn't be fighting for acceptance into a straight institution that was based on a whole bunch of fucked-up sexism and property relations and fitting into a certain somewhat conformist lifestyle.

We saw a redux of some of these arguments in the Prop 8 campaign--when a campaign staffer advised us not to wear "Prop H8" t-shirts because "we want to be about love, not hate," or in the No on 8 ads that consistently featured no identifiably gay people, never used the word "homophobia," and only brought out "discrimination" at the last minute. The interesting thing about the Prop 8 protests has been that from the very first demonstration the day after the election, people in the crowd instinctively made the obviously link--that overturning Prop 8 is not about fighting for marriage; it's about fighting bigotry, discrimination and homophobia. It's about the visibility of gay people, which is still the number one defense against homophobia. There is a reason that voters under 30 voted 2-to-1 against Prop 8--young people are much more likely to know someone who is openly gay.

I'm getting off on a bit of a tangent here, but I think these are issues that will continue to crop up in the gay rights movement. The point of bringing them up isn't to "solve" anything. Any identity-based movement that unites people across class, race, gender and political lines has divisions in it. While the next step of the specific movement against Prop 8 is a little unclear, it will be interesting to see how this movement develops.