Take your anger to the streets.

BY IVY BOTTINI
ILLUSTRATION BY BRENT DUNDORE

Our community’s grassroots ground troops are marching in places we have never marched before; from Woodland Hills to La Jolla, Redlands to Rancho Santa Margarita, Visalia to Anaheim, and the list goes on and on.

The first protest march was held the night after Prop. 8 passed. Starting as a rally in West Hollywood, attitudes shifted as thousands of marchers split into three groups heading into neighborhoods and to the bright lights of Hollywood Boulevard, returning to West Hollywood early the following morning.

These marches became the flash point for ongoing protests up and down the state. We raged at the voters who betrayed us. We raged at the ethnic groups we defended against discrimination, who now openly leveled their discrimination against us.

As I watched the television. coverage, especially the footage of the crowds moving forward together as one, I knew that our detractors had finally done it... awakened our grassroots army that had fallen silent about 10 years ago. Our community had fallen silent as LGBT organizations emerged and built their influence, shutting out and discouraging street grassroots people who had marched for years against initiatives aimed at taking away our rights. Our community was run by “suits,” as they were nicknamed. The large organizations became the decision makers on how best to deal with those who would deny our rights. The marchers, sign makers, security teams, bullhorn monitors and our community spontaneity silenced, bowing instead to the wisdom of the suits. We became a community of check-writers to the ever-expanding list of state and national LGBT organizations.

Our Prop. 8 campaign was the most controlled and immaculate campaign waged in my 40 years of activism in this community. Where were the dykes, the queers, the fems and the butches? The young people and our elders? Where were our straight friends? Where was our visible human passion, our outrage, our tears and our determination? Oh, I forgot, we were home, writing checks.

OK, I will give the suits all the phone banking and the T.V. ads that at times confused the viewers, avoiding talk of discrimination until the last few weeks, dwelling instead on love and marriage which only further committed the “Yes on 8” voters.

Then came the day after the vote taking away our right to marry granted by the Supreme Court of California. That was the day our ground troops stood up and said “enough!” They filled the streets night after night, chanting and screaming their outrage. They came out of their be nice closet.

I was reminded by a street organizer of something I said at the end of winning three initiative struggles: “We should never leave the streets. If we do, we will start losing these battles.”

We took the power of the street back too late this time, and we learned a hard lesson. We are who we are, we will never be suits and we must never go into the be nice closet again.

The undeniable fact is that we need each other to do what we each do best. The streets lend themselves visually to our passion, undying belief in our equality and our inalienable right to claim it. The suits do what they do best; raise money to get our message out.

For many years I wore an identification bracelet that had the word Affirmation engraved on it. This was in response to one leader’s early belief that our community’s goal should be assimilation. We should strive for the day when we would not need labels, not identify our sexuality and not get upset at queer jokes, but rather blend in, be like “they” are. I thought that idea died years ago, but every so often I hear it echoed. We must be good gays, lesbians and transgenders. We must resemble them. Don’t make waves, be calm, never get angry. Then maybe they won’t notice us and will no longer hear our demand for equality, and if we are nice, someday down the road, we might get to sit in the front of the bus with the right people, wearing the right clothes, using the right words and walking in their footsteps. Never ours. We should assimilate into their ways, their style, their beliefs and use their words. We should structure our relationships to fit how they need to see us, never equal to their relationships. We should keep our sexual desires out of their sight and sound. We should never question too loudly or mourn too publicly our pain and outrage at the killings and beatings we suffer. We must never make them feel guilt over their treatment of us. If we do all these things, maybe they will accept that we do exist.

I have no intention of assimilating. I am who I am and if you don’t like it you can kiss my big lesbian ass.

I believe that when our ground troops filled the streets each night after our election loss they affirmed the same sentiment.

As we move forward, we must never let our own community silence those of us who do not always ask, “please sir, may I have more?” We won’t always be quietly waiting for the suits to tell us what to do and how to think. We are at times loud, crude, embarrassing and frustrating. We won’t take orders, preferring to walk instead in footsteps made over decades of public fighting, footsteps honed from the feet of our historic queers and dykes who lived, and sometimes died, their truth and struggle in the light outside—not within the darkness of—the be nice closet.