Kelly At Large #123 Size Matters Edition
In which I pick at a scab, discuss the relevance of size and of demos, and ask, essentially, just what a crowd is anyway.
Hello from Paris where our grape hyacinths are blooming in their window box, and the pot of arugula AKA roquette is taking off. Further out the window, the chestnut tree whose arms had nothing but fat buds two weeks ago is now leafy and green.
The demos against the change in the retirement age continue two or three times a week, like people taking exercise. Maybe they’re right. Maybe not. In any case, an increasing number of the French—25% according to a poll quoted by a news channel—now think their growing violence is acceptable.
I’ve been thinking about why I don’t. And also why I immediately quit listening when people ask, “How can you ignore the will of the people? The crowd on the street?”
Frankly, I much prefer to see them at the ballot box. It’s not that I don’t like demos. I’ve organized several, including the ground-breaking Dyke March in Washington, D.C. in 1993 when we got 20,000 joyful dykes onto the street. Being able to assemble and protest is an essential tool for democracy, especially for those shut out of the legislative process.
But what it boils down to is that crowds are just loud voices. They could be saying anything. Numbers make you visible, not necessarily right.
The first big protest I went to was the Women’s March on Washington, D.C. in 1989 when between 300K and 600K women and girls marched in defense of abortion which had been legal for less than 20 years, and was already under attack on the streets and legislatures and courts. Protesters carried coat hangers. Mourned the dead from illegal abortions. Could already see protections slipping from their grasp.
What else could women do but march? We voted, of course, but who were our advocates? At the time, there were only two women out of 100 U.S. Senators, and twenty-three in the House out of 435 delegates. Sandra Day O’Connor was the only woman on the Supreme Court.
My second lesson, though, about the power of the crowd, was the one I marched through in 1991 with the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization at the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade organized annually in New York by the Ancient Order of Hibernians. We’d actually been banned from participating under our own banner, but one Brooklyn division thought we had a right to be there, and invited us to march with them, so we did, joined by Mayor David Dinkins, the first black mayor of New York.
Something like two million people attend the parade every year. In 1991, the crowd on the sidelines mostly hated our guts. Sometimes they just scowled and turned away. Many hurled insults, waved signs saying gay people should die. Screamed AIDS was God’s Judgement, along with the occasional racist threat for the benefit of Dinkins. Sometimes they threw bottles and beer cans. A lot of the cops supposed to protect the mayor and us smirked with satisfaction when we got hit. For months and years afterwards, ILGO leadership would check their answering machines and there’d be death threats. “We know where you live.”
During the couple of years I hung out with the group, homophobes beat a few members so badly they ended up in the hospital. And why not? The will of the people was on their side. Who were we homos but garbage, sickos, criminals facing not only stigma, but prosecution? Gay sex was still illegal in many U.S. states until the 2003 Supreme Court decision. In many places we could be refused jobs, tossed out of our homes, have our kids taken away—legally.
As for France, I remember how in 2012 the religious right mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to protest against the proposed law giving same-sex couples the right to marry. As always, they said we were perverts. Garbage. Evil. A menace to society.
I wasn’t around for the first massive, violent demos in Paris in which “socialist dictator Hollande” was also denounced, but friends were. They were shaken. They told us they didn’t feel safe anymore. And they weren’t. Harsh words increased anti-gay violence. Family members that had seemed to accept them, turned out to have been merely overlooking their monstrosity.
Cuba, of course, loves a demo so much they’ve forced people to go, to be enthusiastic, rowdy, even violent. The protests could be against anybody. Capitalist pigs. Homos who should be sent to concentration camps. The wind shifts. Maybe the next target is you. I know a gay Cuban living in France who told me that one day, in the midst of a massive, furious crowd, he suddenly asked himself why he had a rock in his raised fist ready to throw at some stranger. And he lowered his fist and he dropped the rock. It was like awakening from a dream.
In other news
La MaMa to Present Lost Work by María Irene Fornés
It's taken dramaturg Gwendolyn Alker five years to recover the script for Evelyn Brown (A Diary).
‘Bees are sentient’: inside the stunning brains of nature’s hardest workers
Research suggests the insects that are essential to agriculture have emotions, dreams and even PTSD, raising complex ethical questions
Invisible Women: crocodile dung & weasel testicles
Why is birth control still so…meh?
You Are You. We Live Here. This Is Now.
A Freddie de Boer piece, responding to a New York Times article about kids and how “they like being online more than living their real lives because their online lives serve as an intermediary and distraction from what they don’t like about themselves and their world.”
Online you can mute yourself, render yourself an unperson, remove yourself from existence and in so doing avoid the pain of being alive. The attitudes here are indicative of young people who have been failed by the adults around them, who in addition to the responsibility to keep them alive should be forcing them to contend with the inevitability of sadness and the need to come to terms with themselves. Someone has to tell these kids, “wherever you go, you’ll find yourself there, and you have to start to do the work of accepting who you are, as much as you may not like yourself.” The stakes are high. I don’t mean to get dark here, but a kid who fantasizes about the ability to mute himself in real life is a kid I worry about someday muting himself permanently in real life.
That’s it for this time.
I hope that this is my last piece about demos and retirement and retirement demos, though this was really about that old boring thing democracy.
Disgruntledly yours,
xoxo K
I forgot to mention I was there at the March. I have been grateful to you and your friends for that day for the rest of my life. I knew what lesbian power was after that. The power of love and fun and freedom. The happiness I saw on the faces of the men on the sidewalk cheering on a “dyke march” and not insisting they be with us. I thought they finally got it.
And we saw each other. And what we could be. We went back home and started our own lesbian avengers chapters. We did a few powerful actions. It lasted about a year.
The lesbian avengers chapter in Santa Cruz was destroyed from within by a man who bullied the group into doing topless car washes and topless rollerblading demos.
But it was a moment. Oh what a time it was.
Yes crowds don’t change the views of men in power. They change the participants. I learned this organizing labor strikes. The work of preparing for a strike and voting for a strike is what built solidarity in the people who then became The Union. It was seeing each other that changed minds: our own. We became a “we.”
In a democracy this is what leads to people voting and taking political power for themselves.
Great post.