One of the things that I really like about Blue Like Jazz is there are parts with which I can identify very clearly. He writes about a friend of his who went to a rally against President Bush. He says that she was doing it to be cool; there was no conviction inside her that the things Bush was doing were wrong, only a sense that protesting Bush put her in a group of people with whom she identified for reasons that have everything to do with upholding her picture of herself as a cool person.
In the spring of 1993, I attended a huge gay rights parade in Washington, DC. I had marched against the first Gulf War, so this was not my first massive protest march. There were probably 750,000 people there, and the march was held up by ACTUP holding a die-in in front of the Clinton White House. This was also the march which was featured heavily by Jerry Falwell's TV show, with pictures of a six-and-a-half-foot-tall drag queen dressed as Cher to show the whole world who was really there, and what their agenda really was.
On the way to the gathering spot, the group I had ridden the Metro with passed a homeless man sleeping on a grate on the sidewalk. Everyone walked around him without even looking at him. One even stepped over him. I put two dollar bills under his hands, which he was using as a pillow.
As we stood in the warm sunshine, waiting our turn to step off, getting our chant ready ("2, 4, 6, 8! Who says your preacher's straight?"), I kept going back to that homeless man, and the way he was invisible. As I listened to the speakers, and watched the muscle boys - all of whom looked like Mr. Universe but sounded like Richard Simmons when they talked - in their speedos and the Dykes On Bikes walk around topless daring any man to look at them, I kept going back to that homeless man on the street. We finally stepped off, and were moving up Pennsylvania Avenue, doing our chant, the counter-protestors no longer waving their signs, I kept thinking about that homeless man. At the National Archives, I left the parade, hopped on the Metro and went home. I have never done a big march, nor will I, ever again.
My experience that day changed the way I thought and behaved. Now, I still believe that gay rights are important, even necessary for a truly just society. That day, however, I felt surrounded by mostly white, mostly privileged, upper-middle class people who wanted the government to get people to stop calling them "fag" and "dyke", while some poor man had to sleep on a grate with his only blanket a tattered an filthy trench coat. I realize the situation is more complex than that; that Saturday, however, that is how clear it was for me.
When Lisa got home, I told her all this, and I said, "Who's marching for that homeless man? Whose demanding the government help this man sleep in a bed, maybe get trained to work, get off booze?" She sat and listened, and I think she understood.
To this day, I look back on that moment as pivotal in my own life. I know longer believe that massive protest marches do much of anything but make the participants feel good about themselves. When a group of self-consciously liberal young people (we were all in our 20's, that period when people are most earnest about their radical political convictions) can not see a man sleeping on a sidewalk, then all the good intentions in the world, all the demands that things change is a bunch of bullshit, as far as I'm concerned.
Fifteen years later, with our financial infrastructure collapsing around us in real time, our military broken, and our political discourse chock-a-block with liars and fantasists, criminals and ninnies, I do not see where we have become better through protest or politics or legislation or pretty much anything. It would be nice to believe that a change in political party will change much of this, but that's as fanciful as believing that hundreds of thousands of people marching through the nation's capital chanting nonsense will change the country's mind about minority rights. In the years since that initial revelation, I have ceased to believe there is a solution to our problems that, if only grasped by enough people in a rational manner, would effect the kind of change we might like. We have to live with this crappy situation because the world is full of crappy situations to which there is no solution.
Except, maybe, in our own little worlds, where we live cheek by jowl with others who need our love and attention and our non-earnest support. Maybe that's all that we can hope for. Maybe, too, it's enough.
