Seattle Sees the Rebirth of a Queer Nation
Image source: subsetsum stream on Flickr.
Saturday I spent the day on the streets of Seattle, participating in the Join the Impact march to protest the passing of California’s Prop 8, which repealed same-sex marriage and left 18,000 couples uncertain of their marital status. Without the very personal sense of deep outrage and loss that drove the rally my friends back in San Francisco all attended, Seattle’s march felt jubilant.
Once we hit downtown, I jumped out of line to run up to Ladro to grab some water — it’s been so long since I’ve protested that I’d forgotten the essentials. The sale took five minutes. By the time I descended to the street again, I still couldn’t see the end of the column of marchers. The dailies have estimated the attendance at 6,000, but the crowd felt much, much bigger.
It also took my friends and I, all in our 30s and early 40s, quite a while to remember the last time we participated in an LGBT civil rights demonstration. For me, it was the million-’mo march on Washington, D.C. — in 1993. Too young to join up with ACT UP and Queer Nation in their prime, relieved of a sense of mortal urgency by the antiretroviral cocktail, our generation of blue staters became the first gays in American history to wallow in the luxury of living a comfortably hate-light life. It took a moment of simultaneous political empowerment and disenfranchisement to remind us that we had larger responsibilities.
One of the most exciting parts of the march was to watch LGBT protesters in their late teens and twenties. It may have been their first political gathering outside overly corporate, unfocused, clichéd Pride (TM) parades. I could see them discovering the heady mix of self-righteous exultation, camraderie, and cruisiness that made the LGBT rights movement so exciting back in the day.
1 comment(s)
david stoesz says:
This made me laugh out loud:
"the heady mix of self-righteous exultation, camraderie, and cruisiness"
Posted On: Monday, Nov. 17 2008 @ 2:06PM