Protesting Protest

Tonight, I had finished eating dinner with my friend David in a restaurant in the Castro, and we were still there, talking, when we noticed a parade of "No on 8" protesters marching past the window down Castro Street, so we went outside to see what was going on. "Is it another protest?" David asked, as there had been a much larger protest at City Hall this morning, but as far as we knew, that was long over. "Oh, you haven't seen? They do this every day," we were informed by an employee of the restaurant who had also come outside for the commotion. "Oh, that's great," I thought to myself.

It's an interesting time we're living in. With the notable exceptions of a riot outside a bar in NYC in the late 60's, and some angry activism in the late 80s and early 90s related to the failure for anyone in any sort of power to address the AIDS epidemic, gay people have distinguished themselves with their disorganization and laziness when it comes to their own rights. Why seek real change when it's easier just to complain? Our failure to organize for our own rights has exposed the sham that is the gay "community," in that for being such a small minority, we're already splintered into so many subgroups that the word community is really a misnomer. Yearly we celebrate our very presence in a self-congratulatory and corporate sponsored manner, and most of us will devote more energy to what outfit we'll wear to a Pride parade than to considering why we have them in the first place, how far we've come or especially, how far we still have yet to go. It appears that Proposition 8 is changing this, ushering back an age of activism, and Prop 8 is historical in that there are not that many other examples that I can name where a minority group has had existing rights removed rather than just being proactively prevented from achieving those rights. And this anger, not just among gays but among clear-thinking people of all stripes, is fueling a bit of a backlash against the degree to which religious doctrine has been surreptitiously creeping into state policy, which I think is a fantastic thing. Who are these people to demand we put THEIR morals into our constitutions? Where did we get this idea that we are, or should be, a "Christian nation" when our country was, in fact, founded on the principle of the exact opposite, that our nation would not be defined by any one religious belief so we could offer a haven to believers of any faith. Maybe the egregious acts of the Mormons and Catholics and of course, the Evangelicals, will start to shift popular thinking in a new direction: hey, maybe churches are not all jesusy goodness and maybe we've been moving in the direction of intolerance and hatred at their demand. Maybe this isn't such a good thing.

So yeah, I'm all for the protests.

But David and I shortly discovered that the second wave of protesters, after marching down the street in this country most synonymous with "gay neighborhood," staged a sit-in in the middle of the intersection at 18th and Castro, which, for those who have never been here, is probably the gayest spot on earth. David and I looked at each other: why here? we asked.

There was a group of maybe fifty people sitting there, in the middle of the street, blocking traffic through, did you get this, the gayest neighborhood in the world. The crowd was mostly young, early to mid 20s, a pretty even distribution among the genders but predominantly white, and David kept commenting that they actually looked mostly straight. In the center of the protest was an overweight young man, who was certainly not straight, with a megaphone who would periodically get the crowd to chant some trite battle cry, ("What do we want?" "EQUALITY!" "When do we want it?" "NOW!") but I found him very hard to understand. I really want to support any nonviolent form of protest but I found myself becoming annoyed and angry. These people were so lazy, and maybe so afraid, that they're staging a sit-in in their own neighborhood and only harming the businesses that have supported us. Political activism as fashion statement.

It got worse. At some point their leader, or whatever he was, the guy with the megaphone, announced that some of the local businesses had asked if they could please move, if there could be a compromise because the businesses (many gay owned and almost all gay operated) were seeing a dramatic drop in customers as no one could get with a one block radius of the protest with their cars, so could the protestors move to the sidewalk maybe? It was put to a vote and the crowd, seeming insulted, chanted "NO" and then "HELL NO, WE WON'T GO" and at this point I was so disgusted I dragged David away.

Should I be proud of these people for protesting an issue I feel strongly about, when they do so at absolutely no harm to themselves, in a community where everyone already agrees with them, and at some cost to the businesses who keep our neighborhood going? Why didn't they just stage their sit-in at a popular bar or in Gold's gym? Hmmm.

I suppose if I was a different person I could have strode into that circle and grabbed the megaphone and told them all to go home and assemble tomorrow morning in front of the Evangelical or Mormon church of their choosing, or at the location of any of the dozens of businesses who are known to have donated to the cause to pass Prop 8. And I suppose my failure to do so makes me no better than them.