Creative protests

From street theater to fasts, activists keep finding Fresh ways to promote gay rights

For Cleve Jones, it began as a brainstorm one rainy night in San Francisco. Almost 15 years later, the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt has snowballed into a global form of creative protest, documenting and dramatizing the human toll of the disease. With 43,000 3-by 6-foot sections bearing the names of the dead, the quilt now includes contributions from five other continents.

"When it started, it was very much a cathartic expression of loss and gay community solidarity," says the creator of the quilt, a portion of which will be displayed April 30 at the Millennium March on Washington. "But today, it is really a very important educational tool that reaches across cultures."

Jones, who expects to attend the march, personifies the small, inspired protests that are propelling the gay rights movement into its fourth decade. Holdouts in an age of big-money politics, these leaders and their low-budget tactics demonstrate that the fight for justice can be fought by the seat of one's pants. Their methods range from political art projects like the quilt to walks through small-town America.

Their protests also fuel one another. In San Francisco last fall, activist Johannes Van Vugt conducted a 12-day fast against California's Proposition 22, the anti-gay-marriage initiative. He drew inspiration from Gandhi and gay minister Mel White, who in 1995 staged a hunger strike to focus attention on the homophobic broadcasts of Pat Robertson. Last year students at the University of Pittsburgh also picked up on the tactic in their campaign to gain health benefits for the same-sex domestic partners of university faculty and staff.

"Such protests have been a feature of the movement for a long time," says Jeffrey Escoffier, a gay cultural critic and author of American Homo: Community and Perversity. He recalls an incident early in the movement's history involving a lone Philadelphia activist. "I remember being impressed in 1973 when Mark Segal chained himself to the Liberty Bell," he says. The episode didn't endear Segal to some fellow activists, who saw the act as strident. But, says Escoffier, it helped to make a point by using symbolism that struck at the nation's heart.

Even as gay politics at the national level becomes more polished and professional, local activists still come up with creative, unpredictable projects to promote gay rights. These headline-grabbing and sometimes over-the-top expressions -- often involving a lone activist -- can pay unexpected dividends and win new allies in the unlikeliest places.

"It literally came to me in the middle of the night," says Paul Fuller, a Maine resident who was struck in October 1997 by the idea of walking across the state to generate public opposition to a ballot measure that would repeal the state's gay rights law. When representafives of the campaign to save the nondiscrimination law shrugged off Fuller's offer to coordinate plans, several of his friends chipped in to assist his effort. Since the vote was scheduled for February 1998, Fuller, who aimed to finish a week before Election Day, faced the daunting task of a midwinter trek from the Canadian border across 400 miles of lonely backwoods roadways to his destination in Kittery. All the while he wore a bright vest with a message urging passersby to vote against the measure. An experienced hiker, Fuller withstood the rigors of the journey but two years later is still floored by the reactions he unleashed.

"Just a couple of weeks ago some man, who appeared to have his wife and kid with him, walked up to me at the grocery store and said, 'Are you the guy who walked?'" Fuller recounts. "I said I was, and he said, 'Well I just want to thank you,' and he shook my hand." Fuller's efforts notwithstanding, Maine voters repealed the law, leaving activists to try again this year to secure its passage. As these activists gird for another statewide showdown on gay rights at the polls this November, Fuller hints he may launch another shoestring bid to rally voters.

Many protests have been spurred by religious opposition to gay rights. The rise of church-based antigay groups in the 1970s triggered several outlandish stunts, including a famous pie throwing that caught antigay standard-bearer Anita Bryant unawares. The era also spawned the mischievous San Francisco troupe of not-quite-nuns known as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, whose members use street theater to urge fellow residents of the gay mecca to jettison their guilt.

Such stunts reached a peak ten years ago with the uprisings of fiery direct-action groups. "ACT UP and Queer Nation were the last memorable bursts of really creative protest," notes Escoffier. "Some of what they did was shrill and irritating," he says without disdain. "And mostly it was very clever, with a lot of irony and humor." In a legendary 1991 caper, a cadre of ACT UP activists climbed onto the roof at the home of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), a vocal opponent of AIDS funding and condom distribution. They inflated a custommade 35-foot prophylactic atop the house and unfurled a banner reading HELMS IS DEADLIER THAN A VIRUS.

Indeed, the quilt grew out of the same anger over government inaction on AIDS. Jones recalls the moment of inspiration for the project in his book Stitching a Revolution: The Making of an Activist, published in February by HarperSanFrancisco. In November 1985 he and a group of protesters marking the seven-year anniversary of the assassination of gay political pioneer Harvey Milk and upset over federal inaction on AIDS "plaster[ed] the facade" of the San Francisco federal building with "posters inscribed with our dead." As a light drizzle began to fall, Jones surveyed the image, which for him conjured up an enormous quilt that would memorialize those lost to AIDS. Remembering the power of Judy Chicago's art exhibition "The Dinner Party," which galvanized feminists in the late '70s, Jones vowed to pursue his vision.

For some activists, chasing such dreams means overcoming their own cautious instincts. "When we first tossed around the idea of a hunger strike, most of us said it was crazy," recalls Christie Hudson Justice, a leader in the hunger strike supporting domestic-partner benefits at the University of Pittsburgh last year. A few days later, though, Justice, the former cochair of Pitt's Rainbow Alliance, a lesbian and gay student group, was one of 12 people (later joined by nine others) to begin a fast that lasted 17 days. "We needed to take dramatic action to put the health issue front and center," she says. "We did that by showing we were willing to put our own health at stake." With Pitt officials still digging in their heels, Justice and her partner, Pitt staff member Shandra Denise Justice, are no closer to getting the long-sought benefits. But in hopes of revving up their local coalition to push on, they are going to Washington for the Millennium March.

Donna Red Wing will be there too. A veteran participant in creative protests, she now helps local organizations leverage the success of such events in her role as director of the OutGiving Project of the Gill Foundation. Eight years ago, in the midst of Oregon's fierce electoral battle over an antigay ballot measure, Red Wing faced criticism from peers for staging a rural march. Yet the Walk for Love and Justice, which stretched from Eugene to Portland, Ore., soon became a magnet for news coverage and silenced any detractors.

"The walk was not about spin or percentages or sound bites," Red Wing recalls,but rather about "cutting a swath of authenticity through politics as usual." As marchers pitched tents or stayed in homes along the route, they had a transforming effect on participants and local residents, she recounts. "Families followed our progress on the news and waited for us with cold popsicles on hot summer afternoons," she says. "Children and truck drivers smiled and waved at us."

In 1998, as a Human Rights Campaign staff member, Red Wing put the lessons of the walk back to work in a modified version called the Pacific Northwest Equality Tour. With only one sport-utility vehicle, she and six other activists toured Oregon, Idaho, and Washington State, speaking at churches and town squares along the way. All told, the tour conducted 44 events in 33 communities in 17 days, prompting favorable news coverage and helping to forge alliances kept alive by organizing committees left in its wake. The coordinator of the tour was Jonathan Zucker, a nongay ally and now a member of the Millennium March organizing team.

"No media buy can equal the depth that you get when you reach people by going to them," says Zucker, who would like to start an advocacy group for straight allies to stand beside Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. He emphasizes that the role of the Millennium March is to "galvanize" that kind of local organizing, led by generous people like the ones who fed and gave sleeping bags to tour participants. "Those are the people with whom I'm still in touch," he says. "! think they should really be cherished."

Johnson is a freelance writer in Washington, D. C.

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