I was pleasantly surprised to get a call from Newsday's letters editor, verifying my identity as having written them a letter. She told me to watch for it, if they use it, within a week to ten days.
Work was fairly uneventful. I originally planned upon going to the Center's Inquiry Series tonight, which had a look at the gay liberation movement 1969-1972, and Karla Jay (who is featured as one of the six subjects of Martin Duberman's book Stonewall) was scheduled to speak. But, I discovered, upon talking with a member of the gay press, that there was a meeting tonight at the Center of a "concerned citizens group" looking to follow up their actions from the night before. So I opted out of my original plans and went to that meeting.
As it turned out, about 150 or more people showed up for this meeting. So many people the meeting was moved to a nearby bar in the notorious meatpacking district.
To try to categorize the "average" person in the room would be impossible. There were men, women, and transgendered, people in work clothes (like me), college-age kids in jeans and t-shirts, people nearing senior citizen ages, old-time radicals and the newly concerned; even a law-enforcement official from the Gay Officers Action League (GOAL) was there. It would be fair to say, however, that the overall tone of the meeting was one of real leftwing grassroots outrage, and very much in the ACT-UP/Queer Nation vein. A fair amount of self-congratualation was in play. People were very happy to report that on Monday "we won"--and that is true in that the cops, bumbling Keystone fascists that they are, were caught off guard. That the organizers of the march, still very much an unnamed "shadow group" of sorts, were surprised that 4000 people turned up on Monday night is a surprise to me. The entire world is outraged over the death of Matthew Shepard. To expect only 500 New Yorkers to show up is really shortsighted.
Shortsightedness is really what characterized the meeting for me, and I found that discouraging yet expected; but this is not to say what they are doing is not valuable or meaningful. A lot of attention was paid to what happened that night, the legal troubles some of the arrested folks face by not taking a deal from the ADAs, how the police overreacted, etc. What was very clear was that the police very assiduously arrested most of the protest parade's marshalls from the onset, causing chaos for those thousands of marchers who remained.
A lot of interesting things were said at the meeting, but it seemed very clear that short-term considerations were the agenda items, and that a long-term set of goals was not clear. Further adding to my sense of dread for this group was the almost immediate issue of what to call the group (National Gay and Lesbian Liberation Front was suggested), followed by the automatic call to include Bisexual and Transgendered. Personlly, I would just like a catchy catch-all name like "The October Group." Perhaps too Soviet? I think groups with names that reflect their goals are more proactive than names that reflect the participants, especially when they are a diverse group. Remind people what you are doing, not who you are, that's what I say. But then again, I'm "nobody."
One side note: Leaving around the same time I did was Jim, an affable fellow I met a month earlier at Jacob Riis Park on the last really nice beach day of the year. So it was nice to get to talk with him. He told me that he had been involved in Queens Gay and Lesbian Union (QGLU), a group that started as part of the protest over the killing of Julio Rivera in 1990 in Jackson Heights, when it was difficult to get the murder classified as the homophobic killing it truly was.
Previous entry...