| Walking Around the Block for Civil Rights |
Silver Lake played host last night to the latest rally of disenfranchised gay marriage supporters in the wake of last Tuesday’s passage of Proposition 8. The march, planned by generic rally-organizers ANSWER, officially began at Sunset Junction with a series of speeches that were impossible to hear, even when I was standing 10 feet away from the stage, and impossible to watch unless you were in the front of the crowd. After an hour of mumbled lecturing and shouty rallying, the crowd finally began to move. With police in riot gear, cop cars with lights flashing, and mounted cops in Stetson hats stationed at every possible intersection, the 12,000 of us were corralled in a two-mile circle that had been carefully planned out by the city and ANSWER. The whole thing felt a little too coordinated: a walk around the block on a weekend night in a part of town where we’d be unlikely to cause too much unexpected traffic.  By the time I arrived at Sunset and Vermont, a faction of the crowd had began an effort to lead the march west, outside of the planned route and against a barricade of cops. The event’s organizers immediately got on bullhorns and squelched the attempted dissidence, ordering the marchers to “GO EAST!” against the crowd’s cries to “GO WEST!” Finally, the group I was with ended up marching the planned route, although a few thousand demonstrators eventually broke out of the parade and made it all the way to West Hollywood by 2:30am, picking up supporters (including Drew Barrymore) along the way. The prefabricated nature of last night’s rally brings up the question of just exactly what “civil disobedience” means in 2008. Do people have to get arrested for a point to be made? Does having 12,000 people simply show up and unobtrusively march around in a gay-friendly neighborhood for a couple of hours actually accomplish anything? Are accomplishments measured by the amount of media coverage a protest receives? Regardless of the rally’s external impact, it’s clear that the protests of the last week have helped the gay community find a common voice and actively express their discontent after more than a decade of relative complacency. For too long, gays have focused on equal representation in the media while failing to face their real-world problems. While lack of marriage rights is certainly among them, to me, it’s not the most important problem we face– and it’s not as if everything broken will magically be fixed once those rights are granted. I hope the energy from this movement can translate into a heightened consciousness about other issues that have long been ignored by the mainstream gay establishment, like racism, class differences, drug abuse and lack of health care within the gay community. And perhaps all this will inspire more interest in groups like Soulforce that promote tolerance of homosexuality from within the religious right-wing instead of always placing gays in opposition to organized religion. Mostly, though, I’m all walk and no talk. For more detailed and fully thought-out analyses off all this, from some people who are probably more involved than I am, here are a few helpful links: + No on 8’s White Bias - Jasmyne A. Cannick’s article in the L.A. Times about the disconnect between the gay and black communities . + Obama Wins. The Gay Community Loses. What Now? - Japhy Grant’s post-election essay on the failure of Prop 8. “It gets us nowhere to dismiss the people who don’t agree with us, because these people vote and will continue to vote and ignoring them will not make them go away.” + My Battle Cry - The Advocate’s Corey Scholibo’s call for action, directed at the younger generation of gays. + Four Lessons Gay Marriage Actvists Must Learn From Obama - Lee Stranahan’s rundown on The Huffington Post. Check out some pictures I took at the march last night after the jump! |
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