Protest Reactions: In It to Win It

TNG reader Hugh submits the following piece on the Prop 8 protest and march that took place this weekend.

Some thoughts on the march yesterday:

I went down to the march yesterday with semi mixed feelings and the last lingering traces of a hangover (my roommate’s girlfriend arrived in town for the weekend late Friday night and my plans for a quiet and early evening were overturned by hanging out til 3am and catching up). I was kind of shocked at how much it surpassed my fairly low expectations.

For one thing, there were an awful lot of people there for something that seemed to be organized in less time than many keg parties are. At first the significance of this was lost on me. The last big on-the-Mall queer rights demo I went to was my freshman year of high school way back in ’93 and there were a couple hundred thousand people there so the turnout yesterday actually struck me as low initially. But then I realized that the march in ‘93 was the only march happening in the country and people came from everywhere to be a part of it. As we marched across the mall I realized that this was happening simultaneously all over the country. That blew my mind.

The next thing that blew my mind is that there was no central organizing body, really. [Ed. Note - "Join the Impact" was responsible for coordinating the protests.] The Human Rights Campaign wasn’t visibly involved and there were multiple speakers simultaneously addressing the crowd with megaphones in Peace Park (AKA Lafayette Park). One of the reasons I haven’t been to a queer rights protest (aside from the fact that there haven’t been any lately) was that the last big one was the Millennium March, which seemed to be mostly about demonstrating the desirability of dual-income male gay couples as a marketing demographic (I’m sure the intentions were better than that, but that was the vibe it gave off). The last big one before that was ’93 if memory serves me right. Sure I did some protesting and a die-in or two (all ACT UP-organized, if I remember) in high school, but with the drifting away of ACT UP and Queer Nation, there just wasn’t much going on beyond the HRC and they seemed (to me at least) to be collecting money for political work that went on out of sight of most people. I’m not a fan of the HRC but I did give them money when they were the Human Rights Campaign Fund - which on reflection makes the dough connection a little more vivid - but whatever, they’ve done some good work even if I’m not super into how they’ve done it. Yesterday, I didn’t feel like I had to hold my nose, or qualify my support for what was going on. It just felt right.

For a long time I had been feeling down about the depoliticization of queers. I have friends who are political activists who directly or indirectly work for queer rights, but the notion of the queer community (let’s just assume for the sake of argument that such a thing actually exists) as a political body seemed very lost. In the early ‘90s I felt a sense that we at the very least bonded with each other because our situation felt so desperate (again I was in my mid-teens so that probably colored my perception, but I don’t think my impression was too inaccurate). And of course we had the focusing issue of AIDS to give a form to some of our fears. Paradoxically as it got easier (at least in places like DC) to be openly queer, and amazing, though expensive, treatments for AIDS changed our reality and lessened our fears, the urgency of improving our lives politically was diminished. No one fucked with me for being queer after high school (and during my teens it was local skinheads, not my schoolmates, doing the fucking with). Few of the queers I met on campus were political beyond issues within walls of the university. Few of the queers I met in the wider world over the next decade were.

Yesterday felt different. Yesterday I didn’t feel like part of a branded (in the commercial sense) group of queers. Yesterday I saw college-aged club kids screaming themselves hoarse for their rights, our rights. There were groups from the universities there. There were totally normal middle-aged dudes with dogs and punk rock motherfuckers like myself. Most of the reaction from the non-marching public was positive (three cheers to the mail carrier who waved at us coming up 17th St. toward the White House). There were queer men hanging out with queer women. I realized one of the reason I had so many dyke friends as a teenager is that it was politics (and, among my friends, punk rock) that held a lot of queer men and women together and held us together with trans men and women, and that politics had been less evident of late. In many respects, yesterday felt much more like 1993 than anything I’ve experienced since.

So what was missing? Well, I’ve never been to a queer rights march without some share of bare-breasted dykes on bikes, rad drag queens, and leather dudes. So their absence was weird but it brings me to my last thoughts. As many people (Andrew Sullivan, Dan Savage, some posters to TNG) have pointed out, marriage is a deeply conservative social institution. And there is an unavoidable tension between the decades-old political momentum toward (personal and political) liberation of our sexual selves and the desire of some of us to, you know, be old-fashioned and get hitched. Ultimately I think that’s fine. Freedom is about choices and I think we should all have the choice to get married to the person we want to, or not to get married at all. I have a lot of time and sympathy for the argument that marriage isn’t the answer to our problems and that it is a historically flawed institution. Even so, I went to the march yesterday, and I’ve decided I’m going to keep working in some way for marriage until it happens. When the government fully sanctions our relationships (yes, only our most traditional ones, I realize), there will be no excuses left for treating us differently legally in other areas. Those are high stakes, and stakes worthy of our hard work.

However, I think it’s important that we don’t lose sight of everything else while we work for this. Those of us who want to be able to choose to be traditional have to be there for the drag queens, bare-breasted dykes on bikes, and leatherdudes who were largely absent from the march yesterday. We have to support the work a friend of mine does for trans sex workers. We have to make sure we don’t throw anyone overboard so that a portion of us can do something which isn’t all that meaningful to others among us. And we have to make sure we continue recognize the strength and validity of relationships undertaken by people who have no wish to be married.

The first time I marched in support of queer rights, I never would have imagined that a little over fifteen years later that I would be marching for marriage. At the ’93 march, my friends and I met up with a bunch of black-clad multiply-pierced anarchists and made fun of the guppies (until RuPaul took the stage and the Mall was united in DISCO!, anarchists and all). We were so amazed to be fifteen years old and surrounded by so many queers, that thinking forward to what our political reality would be at age thirty wasn’t really possible. At best we were pissed at Clinton for throwing us under the bus and maybe thinking about employee rights? So I’m a little amazed to have found myself marching yesterday for marriage itself.

I cried in 2004 when Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon got married. Martin was the first wife of my first boyfriend’s grandfather, so even though neither I nor he was biologically or legally related to her, it felt kind of personal. The same feeling hit me when they got married (again) this year. It’s a feeling that has overtaken me more than once looking at the photos of everyone across the country who marched or demonstrated yesterday. And I realize it’s exciting the way that marching in the early ‘90s was. On the one hand, there’s a sort of flying-straight-to-the-center-of-the-Death-Star feeling (‘Holy shit! Are we really doing this?’) common to both. In the early ‘90s the excitement was a combination of anxiety about the consequences of being out and the uncertainty of our futures, and relief at finding so may people to share that anxiety with. Now I think that excitement comes from the unexpectedness of marriage becoming a central front in queer rights activism so soon. ‘Maybe we’re not ready for this fight’, we worry. But we shouldn’t worry too much. I’m not sure how, or in which places at which times, but I know we’re going to win this one.