While many of us across the country and around the world have been celebrating the Obama victory, despite the fact that he seems to be scuttling towards the center as fast as his lanky legs can carry him, here in California we’ve also been getting angry and mobilized in the wake of the voters’ approval of Proposition 8. Prop 8 (or Prop H8, as many a sign will tell you) is the bigoted ballot initiative to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry. It passed by a small margin (52%); you can check out the breakdown county by county using one of many interactive maps, for example this one from the LA Times. Without going into a long and detailed discussion of why the No on 8 campaign failed, let’s just say this: white middle class leadership ran a weak and disorganized campaign based almost entirely around TV ad buys, tried to take a ‘moderate’ stance which meant no calling out the bigotry and hatred behind the support for 8, and managed to put almost no resources into street level organizing in working class communities and communities of color. Meanwhile, the Mormon Church and other religious fanatics poured millions into vicious attack ads that played on fears of queers taking over the schools and teaching their evil ways. Then the out of touch No on 8 campaign was surprised when they lost.
In the wake of this mess, tens of thousands of angry LGBTQ folks and their friends, parents, and supporters started seizing the streets in what has turned into the largest queer mobilization wave in decades. Lots of this mobilization has been organized online via facebook and blogs, as well as with mobile phones via SMS between friends and on Twitter. While the ‘official’ No on 8 website was still displaying a lame-ass written message about how we lost but someday we’ll be back, literally overnight people were organizing mass protests, street actions, breakaway marches, and other forms of protest that spread up and down the state of California. Within a week and a half there was a national day of action with tens of thousands of people marching in front of city halls across the country.
I went out to several of these actions with friends here in LA. I think it was on Saturday night a week after the election that I went to a protest at Sunset Junction with Anna from Engage Media who was in town for a few days. ANSWER had somehow opportunistically positioned themselves as the organizers of the protest so we had to stand around with 10,000 other people and listen to an hour of speakers talking through a sound system that was too small to really hear (yawn), then the march began and we were stuck with the ‘approved’ chants over megaphones (the deadly “hey hey, ho ho, prop 8 has got to go,” and the only slightly more creative “black, latino, asian and white, marriage is a civil right!”) We tried out some of our own chants with mild success:
“Prop 8! That’s Hate! Separation of Church and State!”
“Prop 8! That’s wack! Stand up! Fight Back!”
“Latter Day Saints, Kiss Our Taints!”
Things got a lot more interesting once we made it over to around Vermont and Sunset, when about a thousand of us tried to break away from the ANSWER route to head west on Sunset. In fact, everyone was chanting “West on Sunset! West on Sunset!” and pushing up against a line of riot cops. They didn’t budge, so eventually we dispersed… but a scraggly haired young guy came running by telling everyone “Hollywood and Highland, 10pm! Text everyone you know! We’ve done this before, and we know it’ll work, just text everyone in your contacts!” Sure enough, by 10pm there were at least a few hundred people assembled at Hollywood and Highland, even though LAPD had shut down the metro and stopped traffic for blocks. In fact, there were more police assembled along Hollywood Boulevard than I’d seen since the RNC in St. Paul. There were dozens of riot cops in lines, mounted riot cops on horseback, and two long rows of squad cars, side by side, stretching a couple of blocks west from Hollywood and Highland, plus a block long line of motorbikes, assorted vans, and other vehicles. Oddly, all those cops did was hold down the intersection, ignoring three breakaway unpermitted marches of a couple hundred people each that tied up traffic in the area for the next several hours.
Overall what’s been great is that this protest wave is showing a new generation of young GLBTQ and ally activists that they really don’t need the top-down, out of touch mass media messaging of the big gay rights organizations. In fact, that approach has now been exposed as a losing strategy. Also, the new tools of social networking sites and mobile phones do really make a difference in rapid coordination of street mobilizations - as Larry Gross said to me during another protest in downtown LA, pulling together a statewide or nationwide action in the days before widespread use of the Net and mobile phones would have taken several months to a year. We should add the Prop 8 protests to the ever-growing list of mobile-enabled mass actions that includes txtpower in the Phillipines, the rise of the Left to power in the Spanish elections following the subway bombing that the right wing government tried to delink from Spanish military participation in the Iraq invasion, and so many others (check out Mobile Active for more).
So the mobilization result is that lots more people have gained organizing and protest skills and capacities, and hopefully we’ll see fruit from this in a resurgent LGBTQ movement over the next decade. The immediate political outcome? Great pressure on the State and the courts to overturn Prop 8, and the California Supreme Court has in fact agreed to take it on.
Oh yeah, one last note: I Still Think Marriage is the Wrong Goal 
