Stonewall '08

Could Saturday's Prop 8 protests be looked back on as a landmark in the gay rights movement?

by Timothy J. McLaughlin

awakenings

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"Dude, this feels like the '60s," my friend said to me. We were in the middle of a crowd, marching around City Hall to support a repeal of California's Proposition 8, the ballot measure that banned gay marriages in that state. She was likening our march to the Stonewall riots and the civil rights protests, and considering that thousands of people surrounded us, the comparison didn't seem far off.

In the gay rights movement, there have been several turning points. The Stonewall riots, which are considered by many to be the first large-scale gay-rights protests; the AIDS epidemic in the '80s; Matthew Shepard's murder. When Join the Impact, an LGBTQ rights group, organized almost 300 protests last Saturday in cities across the country, the comparisons to those landmarks were quick to follow. The Seattle Times called it "Stonewall 2.0," and The Advocate, an LGBTQ news magazine, ran a cover with the phrase, "Gay is the New Black."

The Oakland Museum of California even started collecting signs and T-shirts from Saturday's rallies. The museum specializes in the history of California and actively collects artifacts from major current events.

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"I think it's important, as a museum, to always have your finger on the pulse of things that will be viewed as historic down the line," says Adam Nilsen, a researcher in the Oakland Museum's history department. He says the artifacts he collects from the Prop 8 rallies will become part of the museum's LGBTQ collection, and will be kept in a warehouse until they are used for an exhibit. He hopes they will be displayed in the near future, but says part of collecting things like this is not knowing what their significance will be in the future.

"A person here at the museum collected Vietnam artifacts when those protests were happening, and I thought, 'What foresight she had to know that this would be viewed as historic,'" he says.

Some people in the LGBTQ community don't think they need to wait for history to judge their movement. They say their time is now.

"Every generation has a rallying cause," says Malcolm Lazin, executive director of Equality Forum, a national gay rights group based in Philadelphia, and executive producer of Gay Pioneers, a documentary about a gay rights demonstration at Independence Hall in 1965. Lazin believes that gay rights will be the cause of this generation. And while he says it's too early to judge whether Saturday's rallies will be looked back upon as a milestone, he says they could still prove to be a key moment simply by generating momentum to the movement's next phase.

Many people are wondering what that next phase will look like. After Saturday, one thing is certain: It will be digitized. Protests in major cities across the country were organized via e-mail, Facebook and text message. Many people credit Web organizing for the unity of the geographically dispersed protests.

Fitzgerald says the impromptu nature of the march also added to the protest's success. "While we were chanting, the Rev. [Jeffrey] Jordan (of the Metropolitan Community Church) came up behind me and said, 'Do you want to march?' And we just started moving. There were people getting out of their cars and joining us. There were straight families with their kids joining in."

Fitzgerald is thankful so many people came to the rally. But she says that in order for the rally to have real historical significance, they need to keep the momentum going. To that end, she started a chapter of Marriage Equality USA in Philadelphia on Monday.

(editorial@citypaper.net)