A rather unremarkable day today at work. I decided, after some email from the grassroots group, to go to their meeting tonight. I spoke to Tony before I left the office, and he said, "So what are they calling themselves? "The Committee to Save the 500? Or the 500 to Save the Committee?" Pretty accurate so far.
The meeting was at PS 41, in the auditorium. It was an odd feeling, having such an adult meeting in such a juvenile setting. Every school might be different but every school auditorium is alike. The wooden seats, the sloping floor, the raised stage with stairs on either side, even the baby grand piano with its ultraplain protective brown covering. This was the setting for a meeting to determine the future of a queer rights movement with radical street-action goals.
The organizers of the meeting were good enough, and foolish enough, to print up an agenda with finely scheduled intervals. This was followed for a little while, until everything got out of hand. Not to hard to predict that.
In the beginning it was actually well-ordered and informative. It turns out that the organizers of the "Matthew Shepard Political Funeral" on 19 October were also the group that chained themselves together and blocked the Mayor from marching in the 1998 Gay Pride Parade, and for some of the protests in Park Slope over the anti-lesbian attacks there.
I had never been to any meetings of ACT-UP or Queer Nation, but from what I have heard and from what I have read, this meeting was probably not far from the meeting I attended tonight. A degeneration into fighting. Actually, I am sure it could have been much much worse.
What was obvious to me is that this group, or at least its organizers, are dedicated to street-level activism. Almost exclusively. The meeting began with T, the sole person I know there, giving an update on how people arrested on 19 October can get legal help. So already the group is as much about itself as about the larger issues of queer rights and hate-crime legislation, or any of the other one dozen or more ideas that were tossed out for the the group's consideration--transsexual/transgender needs and the discrimination against them, a monument to homophobia's victims, understanding the connection between socioeconomically underaccommodated groups and the subsequent homophobia and racism, PWA/HIV concerns, access to health care, community patrols, police entrapment, and many others.
So, the meeting then identified the eight or nine cluster ideas that all these concerns can be fit into. Frankly, I think a lot of the concerns are already addressed by other groups, like ACT-UP, for one. Why reinvent the wheel? Well, in some cases, a lot of people want the wheel to be a radical one, and resist the tendency to become mainstream, like the well-hated HRC in DC, or NGLTF. It all boiled down, I think to a lot of people in the room wanting to have a raging radical protest group, thriving on street actions and demos. Exclusively, I think. So a lot of this is not for me, since I am your average shrill moderate mainstream contrarian curmudgeon.
There were some voices of reason in the room. Some people did actual broach the subject of learning from the lessons of failed or defunct groups, like Queer Nation and Lesbian Avengers. This brought the requisite hissing from the crowd. The use of the word Queer in the Halloween protest flyer pissed off some people, and that was hotly debated. Toning language down to reach straight people. That suggestion brought out some heterophobia. This group does not really seem to want a real straight-gay dialogue. This group is going to be the angry customer that screams at the store manager from the get-go and wonders why they don't get any satisfaction; or at least that's how it seems to me.
Even trying to decide on a structure for the group--one large group or smaller, linked affinity groups--was subject to debate, as it should be. But the debate as to whether to vote on even that became contentious.
Also prevalent was the ISO--the Socialists--who always pop up at gay/lesbian events. It's all so fractious and New York, and it is the perfect example of why smaller towns get things done by sticking together and why New York cannot get it together. The radicals want to rage and fight--mostly with each other, it seems--while the mainstreamed groups carefully avoid controversy and back down, and even do stupid things like endorse D'Amato.
It seems to me that the organizers might benefit from just stating who they are and what they want to do, and get like-minded people from there. But the downfall of liberalism is that accommodating every opinion mires the process. A lot of people forget what brought us there: yet another bias-motivated murder. If nothing else, the group as a temporary name involving "October 19." Sort of what I had in mind, actually, not that I bothered to stand up and speak. As my dinner companion of 24 October pointed out, no one wants to lead if they are going to get yelled at endlessly. The lack of a leader is keenly felt.
The bottom line: Homophobes have one agenda--to prevent gay rights in any form, by any means possible. From severely lacking legislation to killing us, literally. Why can't the New York gay community get their act together and find some concrete common anti-hate stances and start from there? Because everyone wants their particular need to be spotlighted. They want one group to represent every possible need. Will a 500-headed monster really be able to conquer the Goliath of Homophobia? We are a minority. Will screaming at potential allies really work? I don't think so. The answer to anger, as Jason Marsden pointed out so well last week (see 27 October), is to respond not with anger, but with love. And if not with love, than perhaps with eloquence. I have said it before and I will say it again. Sometimes, the best way to defeat the enemy is to sing the enemy's song, to speak their language, to get to know what they are about and respond with a clear understanding, not a blind rage. That's exactly what rage is: blind.