Whose Quality of Life * San Francisco * Tire Beach * The Gay Shame Awards * Budweiser Pride * Prop N Stands for Nightmare: Gavin Newsom's Quality of Life Campaign * Political Funeral * The War * The Eagle * Hot Pink * Waiter, There's A War in My Soup * Gay Sham * The Walk of Shame * Pride * Process, Process, Process * Mary for Mayor * Freedom to Bury

 

Activism disappears from the public record almost as quickly as activists burn out and disappear from struggle. At the tender age of thirty, after twelve years of considering activism a central part of my life, I now find myself telling friends about actions and activist groups of which they’ve never heard. Sometimes there will be a shared remembrance, but all too often, I find myself struggling to remember the details of a particular action, struggling to remember my own history.

My initial drive to write about Gay Shame comes from a desire to enter it into the public record. Rarely does a participant in a particular struggle get to write his/her own history (and have her/himself as an editor), though this is an opportunity we should all enjoy. My initial impulse was to keep myself outside of this history as much as possible, for fear of claiming ownership of events—though who was I kidding? “Objective” history is a cruel lie, and I’m not interested in perpetuating such viciousness.

Nevertheless, by choosing to write an abbreviated impression of each Gay Shame action rather than an in-depth analysis of a few, I do resist a stronger point of view and instead focus on generalizing statements that cannot help but hold some inconsistencies. I mean for this history to be a beginning rather than an end, an invitation for others to write their own versions of the madness and the mayhem. An invitation for others to instigate their own Gay Shame.

Whose Quality of Life?
Gay Shame emerged at a very specific moment in New York City history. It was June 1998, the height of Mayor Giuliani’s reign of terror known officially as the “Quality of Life” campaign, during which rampant police brutality against unarmed people of color was the norm, community gardens were regularly bulldozed to make way for luxury housing, and homeless people were losing services and shelter faster than Disney could buy up Times Square. Giuliani’s crackdown also meant the policing of public sex spaces, both indoors and outdoors, and the closure of sex shops to make neighborhoods safer for gentrification, as well as the mass arrest of youth of color, sex workers, and transgendered women to make the streets “safer” for tourists and yuppies. Neighborhoods historically associated with outcasts, artists, and immigrants (Times Square, the Lower East Side, the Meat-Packing district) became destinations for cool lawyers and partying suburbanites.

Guiliani’s attempts to dismantle virtually everything creative and unique about New York took place with the direct support of many New Yorkers, including gay property-owners and businesspeople in gentrification battleground neighborhoods. This was not surprising, considering the direct role gay people have long played as “pioneers” in fringe areas who ultimately make neighborhoods safer for development. Gay Shame emerged to create a radical alternative to the conformity of gay neighborhoods, bars, and institutions most clearly symbolized by Gay Pride. By 1998, New York’s Gay Pride had become little more than a giant opportunity for multi-national corporations to target-market to gay consumers.

The goal of Gay Shame was to create a free, all-ages space where queers could make culture and share skills and strategies for resistance, rather than just buying a bunch of crap. We held Gay Shame in June of 1998, at a collective living/performance space in Brooklyn known as dumba, and it consisted of performances, activist speeches and tabling, free vegan food and dancing. Several hundred people showed up for the festivities.

A large part of the first Gay Shame was the free ‘zine that we created, called Swallow Your Pride: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Hands-On Activism. Swallow Your Pride contained advice for stickering, wheatpasting, civil disobedience and stenciling, as well as samples of propaganda and stories, rants and articles about sweatshops, union organizing, the crackdown on public sex, Megan’s Law, welfare “reform”, fat activism, AIDS profiteering and needle exchange.

In a New York City where a visible culture of radical queers barely existed, Gay Shame was essential in building ties between queers who might otherwise have been isolated from one another. That being said, Gay Shame was always a project that included a very specific segment of queer New York: diverse in terms of class and gender but definitely dyke-centered and largely middle class, white, under 35 and mostly anarchist-leaning.

Gay Shame in New York inspired people to do similar types of events in other cities, many of them also using the name “Gay Shame.” Gay Shame in Toronto started one year after New York, and Gay Shame in Sweden started shortly after that. I will spend most of this piece discussing Gay Shame in San Francisco, which started in 2001, shortly after I fled New York.

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San Francisco
I returned to San Francisco because late-nineties New York offered me little more than a rabidly consumerist, commodified, careerist monoculture that drained and disgusted me. I returned to a San Francisco that mimicked all the worst aspects of New York. Entire neighborhoods had been bulldozed to make way for giant new lofts, and the radical outsider queer culture that I craved had been virtually demolished and replaced by high-fashion hipsters looking for the coolest parties.

Helping to instigate Gay Shame in San Francisco holds a central place in my struggle to create a cultural home, and to find maybe a little bit of hope in a world of rot. For me, Gay Shame has been an opportunity to help build something transformative, deviant, and dangerous out of alienation and desperation.

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Tire Beach
In San Francisco we decided to hold Gay Shame in an outdoor public space. We chose Tire Beach, a rotting industrial park on the San Francisco Bay where discarded MUNI streetcars are dumped and a concrete factory borders a small grassy area. One of our flyers sums our goals up best: “Are you choking on the vomit of consumerist “gay pride?”—DARLING spit that shit out—GAY SHAME is the answer.” We encouraged people to “dress to absolutely mesmerizing ragged terrifying glamorous excess,” and to “create the world you dream of.” We turned Tire Beach into our queer autonomous space for the day, which included free food, t-shirts and various other gifts, bands, spoken word, djs and dancing, a kidspace for children, and speakers on issues including San Francisco gentrification and the U.S. colonization of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, as well as prison, youth, and trans activism. We encouraged people to participate in creating their own radical queer space, and people argued about political issues, painted, poured concrete and made a mosaic, dyed hair and mudwrestled naked. We organized the event in less than a month, and several hundred people trekked out to Tire Beach to join in the festivities.

In San Francisco, we structured Gay Shame in a similar way to New York, though we had two stages and an insane number of bands. Like in New York, people tabled for political causes on the outside of the stage areas, and speakers addressed the crowd in between performers and bands. We were able to attract several hundred participants in a few weeks time because San Francisco, unlike New York, harbors a large number of queers (mostly dykes and trannyboys), who are drawn to outsider culture. The down-side is that there exists a trendiness to a radical queer aesthetic, and a scene of apathetic queer hipsters. What happened at Gay Shame is that, in spite of our efforts to create a politicized space, many participants were rude to the speakers and seemed uninterested in anything beyond partying and socializing with their friends. We realized that, as organizers, by separating the “politics” from the “partying,” we unwittingly allowed participants to ignore our radical intentions. We resolved to be more confrontational in the future, to ensure that our political agenda would remain clear.

Here is where writing “history” becomes difficult. When I say “we resolved to be more confrontational in the future,” I created a false sense of unity. Though Gay Shame reached consensus to develop more confrontational actions in the future, there has always been a tension between the party and the politics.

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The Gay Shame Awards
In 2002, the San Francisco Pride Committee adapted Budweiser’s advertising motto for the official Pride theme. “Be Yourself—Make It A Bud” became “Be Yourself—Change The World.” After intense discussion among Gay Shame organizers, we decided to directly confront the Pride Parade. We started planning early—over two months beforehand—and were looking for a way to get people excited. We created the Gay Shame Awards, where we would reward the most hypocritical gays for their service to the “community.” In doing so, we sought to expose both the lie of a homogenous gay/queer “community,” and the ways in which the myth of community is used as a screen behind which gay people with power oppress others and get away with it.

We decided to hold the Gay Shame Awards one month before Pride, at Harvey Milk Plaza, the symbolic heart of the whitewashed gayborhood that is San Francisco’s Castro district. We bestowed awards in eight categories: Best Target Marketing, Best Gender Fundamentalism, Best Racist-Ass Whites-Only Space, Exploiting Our Youth, Helping Right-Wingers Cope, The “In” Awards (Celebrities Who Should Have Never Come Out of the Closet), Legends Award (Straight Allies of Reactionary Gays) and Making More Queers Homeless. As with any awards ceremony, we created an official program (complete with a smiling Elton John on the cover) that listed the nominees in each category and also contained a glimpse into some of our discussions as organizers.

For the official Gay Shame Awards ceremony, we built a wooden stage, both so that attendees could see the ceremony better, and also so we would have leverage in case we were attacked by angry gays. By the time we started, Harvey Milk Plaza was packed with attendees, and people were soon spilling into the street. Gay Shame participants served free food and gave out homemade patches and artwork, Gay Shame buttons with the image of Rosie O’Donnell or George Michael and various other delicacies. As requested, people dressed to excess, in exaggerated, smeared make up and glitter, torn ball gowns, and crumpled dress shirts—one participant wore a dress made entirely out of shopping bags—the Gap, Starbucks, Abercrombie and Fitch and other gay mainstays—and stiltwalkers dressed in garbage bags added to the festivities.

A different person announced each category and award winner, and at the drumroll, we burned a rainbow flag. This was the point when we were worried that we’d be attacked by angry gays, but instead the crowd reacted in jubilation, yelling “burn baby burn.” As the award ceremony came to a close, people discreetly moved sofas and the sound system into the middle of the street and the crowd followed. On went the music as people danced, pranced and romanced in the streets. This was a fiery moment—I think we were a little in disbelief that it had all gone so smoothly. As police negotiators handled the cops, we held Castro and Market Streets for several hours before packing up, with no arrests.

The Gay Shame Awards marked a turning point for Gay Shame, where we morphed from a once-a-year festival of resistance to a year-round direct action extravaganza. But we didn’t yet know this. What we did know is that we had succeeded in connecting the spectacle with the politics to such an extent that the two could not be separated. The crowd included many queers both a generation older and a generation younger than us, and even straight tourists gaped in disbelief and wondered: is it always like this?

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Budweiser Pride
San Francisco’s Pride Parade, perhaps the largest in the world, consists of a gated, endless procession of floats, and close to a million bystanders. In preparation for our Pride confrontation, we discussed the feasibility and effectiveness of attempting to block the Parade and eventually decided, instead, to set up our festival of resistance in the middle of the Parade, and from there to bestow awards upon various contingents. We collected sofas, tables and other discarded furniture to install in the middle of the Parade so that we could not be easily removed. We also created a seven-foot-tall cardboard Budweiser can that read “Vomit Out Budweiser Pride and the Selling of Queer Identities,” and a large closet, so that people could put their patriotism back where it belonged. Just in case people wouldn’t have time to reach the official Budweiser Vomitorium, we also created official Gay Shame vomit bags, which described our three primary targets: the consumerism, blind patriotism and assimilationist agenda of the Pride Parade.

Our plan was to meet at the very end of the Parade route, where floats disembarked (the only part without police barricades around it), and to enter the Pride Parade and install ourselves within. Gay Shame organizers met early on the morning of the Pride Parade, and prepared to move all of our props, which required two vans. We arrived at Ninth and Mission Streets, a block from our destination, to a cheering crowd standing confused on the side of the road. As the festivities commenced, the people in charge of scouting made a last-minute decision to change our route and we arrived at the end of the Pride Parade on the wrong side of the barricades. To our surprise, volunteer Parade Marshals began to shove Gay Shame participants, and even instigated the police against us. In the resulting commotion, one participant accidentally spilled coffee on a police officer and was targeted by the cops, grabbed and restrained. After the crowd rallied to her side, she was handcuffed, dragged half a block and thrown into a Burger King, which the police commandeered as an impromptu headquarters. In the course of this person’s arrest, another Gay Shame protester was thrown into a waiting police van.

As these two participants were dragged off to jail, Gay Shame organizers realized that we had failed to plan for the worst-case scenario. In fact, we had specifically assumed that the Pride Committee would not want to have us arrested. How would it look, queers being dragged off for attempting to “join” the Pride parade? We soon found out that this concern was not high on the Pride Committee’s list of priorities. Several organizers went with a lawyer to the jail and the rest of us installed ourselves outside the Parade barricades. The festivities continued, but we lost our momentum as a group and were confused as to how we should proceed in order to maximize confrontation. We attempted to bestow awards upon various contingents—a rainbow nightstick for the gay cops, a Greyhound ticket for Mayor Willie Brown (his famous quote was “if you can’t afford to live in San Francisco, you should leave”) and a closet for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an elite gay lobbying group.

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Prop N Stands For Nightmare: Gavin Newsom’s Quality of Life Campaign
As Halloween approached, a scary monster spread its tentacles to target the most vulnerable San Franciscans. This monster was Supervisor Gavin Newsom, the city council member representing San Francisco’s richest district, including the posh neighborhoods of Pacific Heights and the Marina. Gavin Newsom proposed a ballot measure for the 2002 election, Proposition N, cynically known as “Care Not Cash,” which aimed to slash homeless peoples’ General Assistance checks from the already paltry amount of $322 to the preposterous amount of $59 a month. The missing $300 would be replaced with “care.”

As the election approached, several groups prepared actions in opposition to Gavin Newsom’s brutal Proposition N, and Gay Shame originally intended to create a spectacle that would enhance the effectiveness of these actions. As it turned out, we ended up with our own event, which we called “Prop N Stands For Nightmare: A Pre-Halloween Festival of Resistance.” This marked a broadening of the Gay Shame agenda, from focussing primarily on the rabid assimilationist monster of Gay Pride to challenging all hypocrites, and specifically to confronting the racist policies of a “gay-friendly” politician.

We decided to install ourselves on the stretch of Fillmore Street where Newsom ran five businesses at the time: his campaign office, two restaurants, a bar, and a wine store. We planned to build a Haunted Shanty-town and hold the Exploitation Runway, where past, present and future greats of local, national and international exploitation would…take it to the runway. In order to avoid the problems of our Pride action, we planned for the Marina action in anticipation of arrests, with a civil disobedience structure that included front, back and side marshals, police liason, communications people, emergency decision-makers, and emcees. We gathered in a park a short distance from Gavin Newsom’s campaign headquarters, and planned to march en masse, taking the street and blocking the intersection in front of the campaign headquarters. We wheat-pasted and fliered for a month in advance of the action, and anticipated a large crowd.

When we arrived in the Marina, the crowd was not as large as we had expected, but people were spirited. Though cops forbade us from taking the street, we nonetheless did so smoothly and without incident once we neared our destination. We then rolled down a “bloody” carpet and held the Exploitation Runway in the middle of bustling Fillmore Street. This was a scripted event in which impersonators of key exploiters walked the runway in several categories, including Gentrification Realness (Old School and New School), More Blood For Oil, Displacement Divas, Gavin Authenticity, Luxurious Liberals and Eviction Couture.

The Marina action was another example of how our spectacle served to draw people in rather than alienate them, as became apparent when Marina yuppies gathered around to observe our glamour, and we distributed a pamphlet that exposed the lack of care in “Care Not Cash.” Nonetheless, the cops were consistently harassing us and we made an emergency decision to take the runway up to Pacific Heights and confront Newsom at a nearby campaign function. In retrospect, we probably could have held the street much longer, but our frantic decision turned out to be perhaps the most beautiful and symbolic moment of the evening, as 150 or so of us pushed the sound system and our shanty-town up a steep incline and marched up to Pacific Heights, the richest part of San Francisco.

When we arrived at our destination, a temple where Gavin Newsom was holding a public forum, we were told that he was not, in fact, speaking. As the cops began to shove people, we retreated to the other side of the street, realizing only later that this had been the exact moment when Newsom had arrived. When we returned to the temple side of the street, police informed us that we were too late to attend the forum.

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Political Funeral
Just one week after the Marina action, Gay Shame scrambled together a “Political Funeral For Murdered Queers: Gwen Araujo and Jihad Alim Akbar.” Araujo, a seventeen-year-old transgendered Latina, was bludgeoned and then strangled to death by four men at a party in Newark, CA after they discovered she was transgendered. Akbar, a twenty-three-year-old gay black Muslim man was shot dead at point blank range by SFPD officers after he reportedly brandished two butcher knives he’d removed from the kitchen at Bagdad Café, a popular Castro district restaurant. Gay Shame held our political funeral outside Bagdad Café, one month after Araujo’s murder. We felt that a percussion protest was necessary because most protests of Araujo’s murder had been quiet and no protests of Akbar’s murder had taken place. We wanted to call attention to both the extreme transphobia that still exists in the Bay Area and to the blatant racism of the SFPD.

About a hundred people gathered at 5 p.m. on November 3rd, 2002, with drums, whistles, homemade instruments, air-raid sirens and other noisemaking devices. We marched down 18th Street with torches, all the way to the Valencia police station. Though we were prepared for potential conflict with the cops, we encountered no police whatsoever until we reached the station. This was clearly a conscious decision on the part of the SFPD, due to nervousness regarding public scrutiny of their murderous behavior. Though we had little time to plan the action, the act of noisemaking worked to make the action angry, confrontational and even festive. When we reached the police station, we made as much noise as possible for 30 minutes or so, which rattled the five or ten police officers who had been ordered to stand outside the police station entrance without riot gear.

Though we lacked a closing ritual, the political funeral felt powerful. The sad thing, however, was that several people at the protest voiced their concerns about our outrage at the murder of Akbar. They echoed the media argument—he was armed and black, therefore he deserved to die. This tacit racism was precisely what we were attempting to illuminate by linking the murders of Araujo and Akbar.

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The War
As the U.S. drew closer and closer to war with Iraq, Gay Shame found ourselves necessarily drawn to anti-war organizing. Mostly, our participation as a group involved collaborating with organizers—or disorganizers—of the breakaway marches that occurred at each large mainstream anti-war demo. Though we were appalled by the impending war, what seemed just as appalling was the spectacle of 100,000 people marching down the street and doing nothing to destabilize or confront the actually machinery of war or the ways in which the war serves U.S. consumerist needs.

Participation in the breakaway marches carried with it both a sense of empowerment and powerlessness. The large mainstream anti-war demos served as a cover for a little bit of mayhem and property destruction, of which most of us wholeheartedly approved. Nonetheless, the mostly straight, white male organizers of these marches often carried with them a certain militaristic fetishism and didn’t mind putting other participants at unnecessary risk. This was most apparent when so-called Black Bloc participants would throw rocks at stores from the back of a crowd of over a thousand people, and the police would charge those in front.

For the February 16th, 2003 breakaway march, Gay Shame was obstensibly collaborating with anti-war organizers, and initially this march proceeded along its planned route, but soon it devolved into a police riot against peaceful protesters, as we were surrounded by the cops and many of us were beaten, strangled, or trampled by police on horseback. Dozens of protesters were arrested and nine, including several Gay Shame participants, were held in jail for three days to two weeks. In a city overwhelmingly against the war, why was the supposedly progressive District Attorney holding nine anti-war protesters on inflated felony charges? Clearly, this was an intimidation tactic geared toward silencing any opposition more radical than a permitted march through an abandoned downtown.

There was some disagreement within the group regarding the amount of energy we were expending trying to secure peoples’ release from jail. We had never met many of the arrestees, but we found ourselves doing most of the work to get them out of jail. In addition, since one Gay Shame protester’s nine-day stay in jail resulted from police surveillance at a previous demo, many questioned our association with the so-called Black Bloc, media demon and FBI darling.

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The Eagle
The manager of the Eagle, a San Francisco bar traditionally catering to white leathermen, (though reinventing itself on certain nights as a space for bands to perform and fans of all genders and sexualities to attend) approached one Gay Shame organizer with the offer of a benefit. This was controversial, since, for many, the Eagle, a gay white male space that was notoriously misogynist and racist (like virtually any gay bar) represented exactly what Gay Shame was formed to critique. Nevertheless, we agreed to hold the benefit, since many of us had spent money on various costs associated with demos (photocopying, van rental, paint, etc.).

Though financially successful (Gay Shame raised $1,200), the Eagle benefit brought up deep divisions within the group. At the benefit, it came to our attention that our good friend Gavin Newsom was having his own benefit one week later at the LGBT Center. While I attempted to announce this illustrious occasion, called “Hot Pink,” over the sound system, Eagle staff turned off the microphone, telling me that I was too loud, my queeny voice was too irritating. Louder and more irritating, apparently, than three bands. I explained that this benefit was more than just an opportunity to make money for their bar—we wanted to promote our actions. I was told, “you need to stop prancing around in here.” Later in the night, the manager of the bar came up to me and explained that they did not allow people to announce outside events. When I expressed my disagreement with this fictitious policy, he picked me up and pushed me out the door.

For many of us, the Eagle incident was a blatant example of why Gay Shame needed to be challenging discriminatory policies at bars instead of throwing parties there. Nevertheless, many regular patrons of the Eagle within Gay Shame were extremely resistant to confronting the long history of misogyny and femme-phobia at leather bars, claiming “they’re part of our community.” Since we had formed Gay Shame specifically to critique those within our so-called “community,” hearing such rhetoric was particularly disconcerting. This issue became extremely volatile and it was clear that we would not reach a satisfying consensus. Three people went to the Eagle to talk to the manager, and he seemed to lack any understanding of the bar’s history of exclusionary and hostile policies toward queens, women and people of color. Though he did express some vague regret, he seemed to think that he was just a big guy and that was how big guys behaved.

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Hot Pink
A week after the Eagle festivities, we held a small protest outside of Gavin Newsom’s benefit for the LGBT Center. Newsom’s fundraiser was nothing more than a straight politician’s attempt to pander to San Francisco’s gay elite in order to bolster his looming mayoral campaign against several gay candidates. Our flyers read, “Gavin Newsom Comes Out Of The Closet—As A Fascist!” We gathered not only to protest Newsom’s closeted right-wing agenda, but to call attention to the hypocrisy of the Center for welcoming Newsom’s dirty money instead of taking a stand against his blatantly racist and classist politics.

With about forty people in attendance, the Hot Pink protest was perhaps our tamest. To be sure, we dressed for the occasion in numerous hot pink atrocities, but we had little time to plan much more than a banner drop and the flyering of attendees, though one flourish included handing out hot pink bags of garbage to smiling fundraiser-goers. Attendees, thinking perhaps we were a part of the festivities, even agreed to pose for pictures while holding the delicately arranged trash.

In spite of the tame nature of our protest, police officers, called by “our” Center, were there to greet us when we arrived, over an hour before the start of the fundraiser. Perhaps this protest would have gone unnoticed by the San Francisco public if not for the brutality of the SFPD. As soon as Gavin Newsom arrived, and was escorted inside, the police started to get rough with us. I was thrown face-first into the middle of oncoming traffic and was saved only by another Gay Shame participant (my first boyfriend) who caught me; we tumbled into the middle of the street. After the two of us were dragged into a police van, one of the same police officers who originally hit me from behind swung his police baton at another Gay Shame participant, shattering one of her teeth and bloodying her entire face. Four of us were arrested; one arrestee was put into a chokehold until he passed out.

The spectacle of the SFPD bashing queers outside of San Francisco’s LGBT Center was not lost on local media, as pictures of the police violence became cover stories in both gay papers and the issue also arose in both corporate newspapers, as well as on network news channels. With the arrests of anti-war protesters ten days later, we were unable nonetheless to use this public outcry much to our advantage in either indicting the police or the Center. Those arrested at the Center were held in jail for up to three days and faced charges as ridiculous as assault on a police officer (four counts for me) and felony “lynching,” an antiquated term for removing someone from arrest. Our court cases lasted eight months and charges were only reduced to infractions after our publicized subpoena of Gavin Newsom.

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Waiter, There’s A War in My Soup
Gay Shame participated as an affinity group in the mass direct action organized for the day the war against Iraq began. Our goal was to block a specific exit ramp from the highway, and on March 20, 2003 we gathered furniture, a refrigerator, huge pieces of metal and construction barricades for this purpose. Nonetheless, we were unable to secure the ramp for long, and instead turned into a roving band of marauders, supporting various affinity groups throughout the city, including one outside the notorious Bechtel corporation, which had just won a $680,000,000 contract to rebuild the Iraqi oilfields after the war. This day of civil disobedience was successful in shutting down the city, but clearly it came too late to have any effect on the war. The next several days, however, were a volatile time of public protest and the mass arrest of over 2,000 protesters—though perhaps these arrests could have been more effective if they’d occurred earlier. The crackdown was shocking: with police helicopters flying overhead all night long and protesters thrown into police vans for marching on the sidewalk, it seemed that the war had broken out in San Francisco as well.

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Gay Sham
Just days after the war broke out, a few Gay Shame organizers from San Francisco and another few from New York participated in a conference held at the University of Michigan calling itself “Gay Shame.” Though the conference used the name of our activist group, we were the only activist-specific panel. It was obvious to us that we were a fetish object called on for a few realness points, and we arrived at the conference ready to stimulate a debate on this blatant appropriation.

At our panel, titled for us, “Gay Shame Activism,” we proposed a critique of the conference that involved an invocation of the Reagan-era doctrine of trickle-down economics, which professed that when the rich got richer, eventually the money would trickle down; the poor would pick up the pennies on the sidewalk and buy houses with them. Of course, trickle-down economics really meant that the rich got richer by looting the poor and seizing anything of value that they could get their hands on. The Gay Shame conference, we explained, was trickle-down academia, by which academics appropriate anything that they can get their hands on—mostly peoples’ lived struggles, activism and identities—and claim to have invented them.

We pointed out that part of our group process is to critique every flyer and to make sure that our political agenda is represented, and questioned whether the conference’s publicity for the Gay Shame conference was purely sensational. We also pointed out that there was a typo on the conference literature, and there was an extra “e” in the second word: “Gay Shame” should read “Gay Sham.” We spent most of our panel talking about the history of Gay Shame, both in New York and San Francisco.

Immediately following our panel began a panel called “Fuck Activism?”—clearly the conference was organized in such a way that one activist panel in an entire weekend was still too threatening without immediately questioning the validity of activism altogether. After this panel, there was a surprise question-and-answer section during which famous academics literally stood up and started screaming at us. Much of this screaming was unintelligible but one person likened us to Dick Cheney, implying that by critiquing the academy we were furthering the work of the Christian Right. Clearly, this was a flimsy attempt to shut us up. Another person said that this conversation about appropriation had happened thirty years ago, a not-so-subtly ageist remark to “put the kids in their place.”

Disciplines like queer theory and cultural studies emerged to address the wrongs of earlier disciplines like anthropology and sociology, specifically the Eurocentric model of educating “savages” and “discovering” their cultures. What is frightening is the ways in which these new disciplines have become edge-trendy, elitist ways in which to continue the same questionable practices. By critiquing the ways in which the Gay Shame conference appropriated the idea of Gay Shame without the politicized activist content, we expected to engage critically with academics. Personally, I expected everyone to nod their heads in agreement, maybe write a few clever papers and then fail to apply what we were saying on any level. Instead, we were met with shouting and blatant attempts to immediately silence us. The level to which academics seemed unwilling to engage in critical thinking was somewhat shocking. Sometimes, I compare the experience of the Gay Shame Conference to getting bashed outside of the LGBT Center. No one at the University of Michigan physically attacked us, yet the unwillingness of conference organizers to hold themselves accountable for their appropriation felt eerily similar to the Center’s unwillingness to take responsibility for allowing queers to get bashed on it’s doorstep.

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The Walk of Shame
For the second Gay Shame Awards, we wanted to take the ceremony further and actually confront some of the award-winners. Originally, the idea was to organize a “Walk of Shame” through the South of Market (SOMA) district to confront gay leather bars and sex businesses on their blatant racism, misogyny and transphobia. This, however, became controversial for some who thought that we shouldn’t be focussing our attention on establishments where we were supposedly welcome, but should instead shift our attention once again to the Castro. Another reason for this was to ensure that there would be a crowd of people in our path, since SOMA streets are generally empty, whereas the Castro is packed.

For the Second Annual Gay Shame Awards we added numerous categories: The Commodification of the Male Gays, Propagation of Lesbian Bed-Death, Wargasm Award, Our Favorite Lofts, Best Front Row Seat to Watch Police Brutality, Model Minority Award, Gay for Pay Award, Racial Profiling Award, and the Auntie Tom Award (For Gay Allies of Reactionary Straights). The 2003 theme for the Pride Parade was the inspirational “You Gotta Give Them Hope,” a patriotic call to arms masquerading as a Harvey Milk quote, and so we added the Hope Award. Our ceremony began in front of the beautiful LGBT Center, winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award for succeeding in bashing queers in one short year of existence. Putting together the Gay Shame Awards was somewhat of a struggle due to lack of organizer initiative, and so we were surprised to see our largest crowd since the first Gay Shame Awards.

For the Walk of Shame, we created actual awards, such as a rainbow chastity belt for the Propagation of Lesbian Bed-Death, a rainbow phallus as the Gender Fundamentalism Award, and a framed picture of Dan White, the murderer of Harvey Milk, as the Auntie Tom Award. We were surprised to find that we were actually able to negotiate with the cops to march down an entire side of Market Street, San Francisco’s main thoroughfare. Along the way, we bestowed awards upon deserving businesses. As expected, on-lookers stared at us with a combination of bemusement and dismay as we made our way to 18th and Castro Streets, in front of Harvey’s, the bar named after Harvey Milk and owned by a staunch supporter of Gavin Newsom. The highlight of the ceremony was when we burned an effigy of Newsom in the middle of 18th Street and people danced in jubilation as the effigy burned all the way to the ground and a fire truck arrived to disperse us.

Though some of us were initially upset at our decision to choose the easier targets in the Castro over the more complicated targets South of Market, the Walk of Shame, similar to the first Gay Shame Awards, was the action where we were most successful in blending the energy of the crowd with our spectacle as organizers. Perhaps this was because radical queers, ironically, found themselves more comfortable in the gayborhood.

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Pride
At one point during our planning of the Gay Shame Awards, it seemed likely that we as a group did not have the energy or commitment to create something as grand as the Walk of Shame, and we consensed on doing a smaller action at the Pride Parade, a judging booth for floats. This was a hasty choice, and did in fact contradict an earlier decision to avoid an action at Pride. Nevertheless, after the success of the Gay Shame Awards, several people were motivated to do a second action two days later. The plan was for people to meet near the end of the Parade route, though the meeting place stretched an entire block and people had difficulty finding one another. At the last minute, when participants learned that Gavin Newsom was actually marching in the Parade, several activists jumped over the barricade, ahead of Newsom’s contingent. This resulted in Newsom supporters attacking Gay Shame activists and ensuring the arrest of eight people, who were then held several days on ludicrous felony charges. Those of us not participating in this action immediately scrambled to gather legal support for an action we had not planned. Luckily, we were able to create enough of a scandal that charges were dropped against all arrestees upon release from jail.

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Process, Process, Process
In the first two years of Gay Shame’s existence in San Francisco, we managed to operate on a loose consensus structure without engaging in endless conversations as to who we were or what we stood for. To be sure, many actions involved intense disagreement and even bitterness, but somehow we lasted two years without experiencing a stall in process. During our anti-war actions, Gay Shame meetings swelled from about five-to-fifteen participants to thirty or forty—at times, we would arrive at meetings and there would be fifteen people whom no one had ever met before. In order to run the meetings more smoothly, we initiated a more formal consensus process and a more organized system of facilitation. Though this failed to please everyone, we were still able to continue our weekly open meetings without major incident.

We also decided, both for security reasons and in order that no one be identified as a “leader” of Gay Shame, to call ourselves “Mary” when speaking with the press. This was one example of the creativity and sense of humor Gay Shame lent to serious concerns of security and accountability—by calling ourselves Mary, not only were we invoking a camp queer history and spoofing media concerns about authenticity, but we also developed a way to endlessly amuse ourselves with new Mary names: Mary Poppers, Mary Calendar, Mary Nigger, Mary Tyler Mutiny…

Like the arrestees at anti-war demos, most of the arrestees at the Pride Parade were people whom Gay Shame organizers had never met, and many were even from out of town. Upon release from jail, one Gay Shame organizer decided to call a press conference for the following day. This was a departure from Gay Shame process, since in the past we had only conducted press conferences in order to get people out of jail.

The press release stated, “Queer Community Unites Against Newsom,” and at the press conference arrestees and the Pride Committee President spoke of their anger at Newsom’s policies of targeting poor and homeless San Franciscans, and one participant repeatedly identified his legal name for the press. To many Gay Shame organizers, the message of “queer unity” at this press conference directly contradicted everything we sought to represent—this controversy exposed fundamental disagreements within the group about issues of accountability and even arguments over the core values of Gay Shame. Though we started Gay Shame to expose the idea of a queer community as a lie that serves only those with the most privilege, increasingly it seemed that many within Gay Shame were questioning this confrontational stance.

Over the next two months, virtually every Saturday meeting was spent arguing over process. After much discussion, and the first block of consensus in our entire two years, we did agree not to hold emergency press conferences unless someone was in jail and we did clarify our commitment to identify ourselves as “Mary” to the press. We also came up with a list of “Points of Unity,” though many of these were so contentious that in the resulting document it was unclear whether we were saying anything at all.

Another concern that arose during our process period involved one of the nominees in the Model Minority Award category of the Gay Shame Awards, the black gay hip-hop group Deep Dickollective (D/DC). The nomination stated “[we nominate] Deep Dickollective for being radical enough to stay trendy but not enough to question their own masculinity or resist marketing themselves to a largely white audience.” This was the only nominee at the Awards to solicit boos from the audience. The audience critique centered around the fact that Gay Shame, a mostly white group, was criticizing an independent (and popular) queer black artist collective. The irony, of course, was that the most vehement proponents of this nomination were two black Gay Shame organizers, one of whom had been part of D/DC.

Several questions emerged: Is a Gay Shame Award successful if people within our social circles are upset? How can a mostly white group responsibly critique the hypocrisies of “progressive” queers of color? Are Gay Shame Awards a measure of infamy or an invitation to discussion? Within a mostly white, radical queer activist group, what space exists for people of color to critique other people of color? Would rejecting the nomination of Deep Dickollective have silenced people of color, specifically black males, within Gay Shame? And, of course, an old favorite, one that had plagued us since the very beginning of Gay Shame: who is “our community?” Is there a contradiction between creating a culture of resistance and allowing some queers to be exempt from criticism?

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Mary for Mayor
As part of Gavin Newsom’s mayoral campaign in 2003, he introduced Proposition M, which sought to ban all forms of panhandling (except, of course his own panhandling to the rich). As the election loomed, and Newsom held an enormous lead in public opinion polls, Gay Shame came up with the Mary for Mayor Campaign, in which a new candidate—Mary—entered the mayoral race and delivered a truly radical platform that included converting all members of the SFPD to nutritious compost, supporting terrorism in all forms, and advocating forced relocation of loft condominium owners into the San Francisco Bay. In addition to a fictitious candidate with grandiose plans, we created numerous organizations who wholeheartedly supported Mary in her campaign: Terrorists Against Gavin (TAG), Fashionistas Against Gavin (FAG) and Riff-Raff Against Gavin (RAG). TAG resurrected the image of Patty Hearst, aka Tania, in the Symbionese Liberation Army of the 1970s, gun in hand, and FAG pronounced: “Gavin Newsom is so last season.”

The Mary for Mayor action included all of the Gay Shame hallmarks. First, a festival or resistance, this time outside a Gavin Newsom fundraiser in the heart of the theatre district. Second, a ceremony, in this case the delivery of Mary’s platform, including a campy theme song resurrected from mid-‘90s club culture (“Tyler Moore/Mary”). Third, elaborate and disastrous costumes that included construction site material, bloody underwear, and a stuffed snake. Fourth, a ‘zine that detailed both the vicious platform of Gruesome Newsom and the liberatory absurdity of Mary’s largesse. Fifth, the usual assortment of hand-painted signs, free food, banners and buttons. And sixth, an event that markedly differed both in scale and scope from our original intentions.

The Mary for Mayor Campaign Kick-Off commenced down the block from the Newsom fundraiser. The police had already arrived in order to prevent us from moving closer, and immediately began to threaten confiscation of the sound system and the arrest of anyone who disobeyed their orders. This, of course, meant that we quickly took to the street, blocking traffic in front of the gala, and then when cops began to surround us we moved a block away, in front of the luxurious and fashionable Clift Hotel, and finished our ceremony in the middle of the street, occupying the whole block for over an hour while burning effigies, delivering Mary’s platform, attempting to enter the Clift Hotel and—of course—dancing, prancing and romancing.

The Mary for Mayor Campaign Kick-Off was both more and less participatory than any of our previous events. We recruited people on-the-spot to improvise Mary’s campaign pronouncements, and encouraged the crowd to join us in everything from blocking the street to doing runway outside the Clift Hotel. Nonetheless, most members of the crowd seemed more resistant than ever to joining the festivities and preferred to watch from the sidewalk. We struggled, as organizers, to empower the crowd to engage in the same level of risk-taking as we did. By the time we marched through the Tenderloin to City Hall, our numbers had dwindled from about 150 to 40. The Mary for Mayor Campaign nonetheless arrived at City Hall and was rudely rebuffed by members of the sheriff’s department. Of course, Mary had plenty to do outside.

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Freedom to Bury
Three months after Gavin Newsom’s narrow win in the mayoral election, he pulled the ultimate risk-free political stunt and “legalized” gay marriage. Throngs of gay people from across the country descended upon City Hall at all hours of the day and night, camping out, sharing snacks and wine, and toasting Gavin Newsom as the vanguard leader of the gay and lesbian movement. If Gay Shame organizers already felt marginalized for protesting Newsom, now we felt like pariahs. It was obvious to us that if gay marriage proponents wanted real progress, they’d be fighting for the abolition of marriage (duh), and universal access to the services that marriage can sometimes help procure: housing, healthcare, citizenship, etc. Instead, gay marriage proponents want to fundamentally redefine what it means to be queer, and erase decades of radical queer struggle in favor of a sanitized, “we’re-just-like-you” normalcy (with marriage as the central institution, hmm…sounds familiar). Just the fact that challenging the gay marriage bandwagon became immediate heresy exposes the silencing agenda of gay marriage proponents as they move steadily towards assimilation into the imperialist, bloodthirsty status quo.

Soon after Gavin Newsom’s marriage stunt, a forum took place to thank “Saint Newsom” for his hard work (the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a drag troupe who dress up as nuns, later performed a canonization ceremony at their annual Easter celebration). The gay press was uniformly fawning. Even more embarrassing was a cover series on gay marriage in the March 17, 2004 issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, San Francisco’s progressive weekly. The subheading of Bay Guardian Editor Tim Redmond’s article read, “Newsom, Gay Marriage, and the Politics of the Revolutionary Gesture.” In the article, Redmond compares Gavin Newsom’s decision to direct city officials to grant same-sex marriage licenses with “AIDS activists who crashed meetings to demand action [and] pacifists who tried to shut down the war machine.” At the time of Redmond’s article, AIDS services were being gutted due to a state budget that slashed healthcare to the most vulnerable, and Newsom had made no attempt to save these services. Nor has Newsom ever made any statement condemning the U.S. war in Iraq; in a city overwhelmingly against the war, we can only assume that Newsom’s silence means he supports it.

Newsom’s marriage charade is anything but a “revolutionary gesture.” It’s a risk-free give-back to the gays who got him elected, and a ploy by a power-hungry, ruling class politician to get national attention. The rush by the straight left to jump headfirst onto the marriage bandwagon exposes a lack of understanding about progressive or radical queer politics, and even a lack of commitment to left “values.” Marriage is still a central institution of patriarchy, right?

The fight between pro-marriage and anti-marriage queers is not a disagreement between two segments of a “community,” but a fight over the fundamental nature of queer struggle. When Newsom weighed in on one side, he gained not only the loyalty of assimilationist gays, but the support of liberals across the sex-and-gender spectrum. As former foes of Newsom capitulate to this newfound “unity,” resistance can seem all the more futile.

Gay Shame has struggled to respond to the shifting political allegiances in San Francisco. We made a flyer proclaiming, GAY SHAME OPPOSES MARRIAGE IN ANY FORM. We also wrote an op-ed in one of San Francisco gay papers, the San Francisco Bay Times. Our latest effort is a sticker that imitates the ubiquitous red, white and blue heart-shaped “Freedom to Marry” sticker. Our sticker proclaims, “We All Deserve the FREEDOM TO BURY,” and continues, “How many Iraqis were murdered while you were getting married?” These stickers are hastily removed by angry gays.

The level to which gay marriage proponents will go to obscure queer anti-marriage messages was especially evident when the Bay Area Reporter (BAR) ran a cover photo of a banner hanging from the LGBT Center, which originally thanked Newsom for his “Leadership, Courage and Commitment to Equality,” but had been covered with dripping red-paint. The BAR failed to address this obvious critique of Newsom’s gay marriage, instead choosing to quote Center Director Thom Lynch as saying, “it shows that even in San Francisco, we can be attacked.”

It is no coincidence that queers who oppose gay marriage are shut out of the picture, since we expose the gay marriage “movement” as a grab for privilege, rather than a civil rights issue. While not all gay marriage proponents may want the freedom to slaughter Iraqis, the gay marriage “debate” allows straight, white, male ruling class politicians like Newsom, George Bush and John Kerry to fight over a fake issue while the real goods stay in their pasty palms, and the U.S. government bombs away. While not all gay marriage proponents may advocate rampant police brutality against people of color, their blind support for Newsom allows him to go ahead with his real agenda: the displacement of anyone who gets in the way of property development. And while not all proponents of gay marriage may favor a rabidly assimilationist gay identity, their prioritization of gay marriage as the central issue for queer struggle narrows the options for everyone else.

What will Gay Shame do next? It’s up to you.

(This is an excerpt from That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation.)

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