December 16, 2009

Community activists and students from five area colleges came together December 8 in Amherst, Mass., to hear presentations on the "state of LGBT inequality." The meeting was organized by the Western Massachusetts chapter of Equality Across America and took up a range of issues, including LGBT bashing and hate crimes legislation; employment discrimination and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act; the "don't ask, don't tell" policy"; transgender inequality; same-sex marriage; and the need to change a section of Massachusetts law that associates homosexuality with pedophilia.

THESE ARE difficult times. It has been more than 40 years since the Stonewall Rebellion launched the modern LGBT movement, and there is still pervasive social and institutional inequality.

However, the laws on the books are out of sync with public opinion. Some 89 percent of people in the U.S. oppose employment discrimination against LGBT people; two-thirds favor allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military; and over 50 percent support same-sex partnerships with the same rights and benefits as marriage. While only 40 percent of people support same-sex marriage, this is one-third more than the 30 percent who supported it five years ago.

And that is in the absence of a mass movement unapologetically demanding LGBT equality, which would do a lot to shift public opinion.

There are over 30 million LGBT people in this country, and tens of millions more who are allies. The contradiction between the laws on the books and the actual and potential public support for LGBT equality is wide enough to drive a movement through. If just a fraction of those people devoted themselves to the struggle for equality, we could build a movement involving hundreds of thousands of people.

Rallying for LGBT equality in Washington, D.C., at the National Equality March (Kit Lyons)

ALMOST A year into the first term of President Barack Obama, with Democratic super-majorities in the House and Senate, it is clear that LGBT equality will not be handed down from on high. We must struggle for it from below. As the abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, "Without struggle, there is no progress."

This is why we organized buses to bring 150 people from Western Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., on October 11 for the National Equality March, joining a quarter of a million people to march on the Capitol building to demand full equality for LGBT people in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states--now!

Many of the leading LGBT rights organizations, such as the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), opposed the march until the last minute, only offering limited support when it became clear the march was going to be a success. Many said it would be a waste of resources. Others, like openly gay Democratic Congressman Barney Frank, said it would have no impact--that the only thing we would be putting pressure on is "the grass."

However, after years of leading a state-by-state struggle for marriage equality and spending tens of millions of dollars--such as the $40 million spent on the failed effort to defeat Proposition 8 in California (including television ads that didn't even mention the word "gay"), as well as millions in campaign contributions to Democrats who do not support full equality--what has the corporate-sponsored "Gay, Inc." gotten us?

Marriage equality has been won in seven states, but it has been taken away in two, Maine and California, where a slim majority of voters were able to strip same-sex couples of their civil rights. And even in states like Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage is legal, without over 1,000 federal benefits, it's still "separate and unequal."

We need a new strategy, one that sets as its goal full equality on the federal level, with no compromises and no more waiting and begging for crumbs. Like march organizer David Mixner said, we're equal, and we need to begin to act like it and demand our rights now!

President Obama was elected last year because his message of change, which included verbal support for LGBT rights, inspired LGBT people, youth and people of color to turn out to vote for him in record numbers. But what has he done? Of the dozens of items on the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's checklist of "low-hanging fruit"--steps towards equality that Obama could make with the stroke of a pen, including outlawing discrimination against transgender people in federal employment and recognition of homeless LGBT youth--only one has been checked off so far: more accurate accounting of same sex-couples on the census.

In the lead-up to the vote on Question 1 to repeal marriage equality in Maine this November, when asked where he stood, Attorney General Eric Holder--whose Justice Department in June, less than two weeks after Obama declared it LGBT Pride Month, defended the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act in court by effectively comparing same-sex marriage to incest--said he didn't know enough to have a position.

Obama, who has said he believes marriage should be between a man and a woman, had nothing to say about Question 1, and the day before the election, Obama's former campaign organization e-mailed Maine Democrats--asking them to call people in New Jersey to support Gov. Jon Corzine, with no mention of the marriage vote in Maine.

The Obama administration didn't step in to support marriage equality in New York, which was defeated last week after several Democrats voted against equality, and despite an international outcry over Bill 18 in Uganda, which would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment or death, the Obama administration has yet to release a statement of condemnation. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, "There comes a time when silence is betrayal."

THIS IS nothing new. In 1960, Democrat John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected having promised African Americans that he would oppose Jim Crow discrimination. However, like Obama, Kennedy did little unless he was forced to act. Instead, he attempted to keep the civil rights movement in check, and to negotiate with and appease bigots such as Alabama Gov. George Wallace.

He only intervened to protect activists from racist Southern brutality when the movement was able to thrust the issue into the national spotlight, making inaction no longer an option. In many cases, FBI agents and federal marshals stood by and watched as local and state police violated the constitutional rights of civil rights activists.

In fact, it wasn't until 1963, when thousands of Blacks led by Martin Luther King Jr. faced Bull Connor's police dogs and fire hoses to win a victory against segregation--exposing the brutality of Jim Crow racism to the eyes of the country and the world--that JFK introduced the Civil Rights Act that was enacted the next year. And it wasn't just Birmingham; there were marches, sit-ins and other campaigns in hundreds of cities and towns across the South, a mass movement involving thousands upon thousands of people.

The African American civil rights movement teaches us lessons that are vital for the success of our struggle for LGBT civil rights today--that it is possible for a mass movement of ordinary people, through determined action and effective leadership, motivated by love and a desire for equality, to triumph over the forces of bigotry and hatred, against odds greater than those that we face now; that we cannot rely on politicians to grant us equal rights, but that we must rely on ourselves to win them.

Politicians will not act in our favor unless they see that the costs of inaction are greater than the costs of action, a calculation based on conditions it is up to us to create. The civil rights movement taught us that we cannot win unless we are clear that we cannot wait--that we must unapologetically demand full equality now. To quote Frederick Douglass again, "Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will."

And the civil rights movement taught us that we cannot win city by city, and state by state. We face federal inequality, so we must build a movement that demands equality on the federal level.

Finally, we must forge unity and solidarity. Shamefully, some, such as Barney Frank and the HRC, have argued that it is "more realistic" to win civil rights for LGB people by leaving our transgender brothers and sisters behind. This has created justifiable resentment within the trans community, and we should strive to make Equality Across America an organization that is genuinely inclusive of trans people, and uncompromising when it comes to their civil rights and demands.

We should also reject other divisive ideas--such as those that scapegoated African Americans for the passage of Proposition 8--and build a movement that is inclusive of LGBT people of color and their demands. Both of these will require more than lip service: we will only forge these alliances by standing in concrete solidarity with movements for trans rights and racial justice.

WHILE THE civil rights movement could rely on the Black church to provide the movement with a framework, resources and a new generation of talented leaders like King, there is not an analogous institution in the LGBT community. However, as King wrote in "Why We Can't Wait," "Fortunately, history does not pose problems without eventually producing solutions. The disenchanted, the disadvantaged and the disinherited seem, at times of deep crisis, to summon up some sort of genius that enables them to perceive and capture the appropriate weapons to carve out their destiny."

Since November of 2008, when California's Proposition 8 banned gay marriage, tens of thousands took to the streets in California and across the country. This setback became a step forward: the launching of a new grassroots movement for LGBT equality. New organizations were founded by young people new to the struggle, as well as by seasoned activists reenergized by the explosion of anger following this bigoted attack on the rights of LGBT people.

Groups like One Struggle, One Fight in San Francisco have engaged in civil disobedience--for example, when hundreds shut down Van Ness Avenue, which leads to the Golden Gate Bridge, after the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8. In San Diego, the San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality staged a sit-in in a marriage license office to protest the California Supreme Court's upholding of Prop 8, where dozens of activists listened to a reading of Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

In Chicago, LGBT rights activists have forged alliances with immigrant rights and labor activists, standing in solidarity with Republic Windows & Doors workers who staged the first successful factory occupation in the U.S. since the 1930s. And on October 11, a quarter of a million people descended on Washington, D.D. to demand full LGBT equality, in a march organized by grassroots activists on a shoestring budget, without corporate sponsorship and without the assistance of mainstream LGBT organizations.

Now, we are taking the next step with the founding of Equality Across America. All around the country, including here in Western Massachusetts, dozens of groups of activists who built the march have founded chapters of Equality Across America (EAA), united around a single demand: full equality for all lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people--now! Regional conferences are being planned for this spring to build EAA, meet with one another and figure out how we can work together to win our demands.

Millions of people are on our side, and millions more will question their homophobia and transphobia if we build a movement to challenge them, just as the civil rights movement changed millions of minds about racism.

We can draw on the rich history of struggles against oppression: the civil rights movement, LGBT struggles of the past, the women's rights movement and the labor movement, among others. And we will have to create new strategies and tactics specific to today: sit-ins at marriage license offices, protests, campaigns to win support from student governments and other organizations, putting pressure on politicians, utilizing the media and creating our own media to get our message out.

We can and have sought allies from other struggles both locally and nationally, but it is critical that we maintain our political independence--that we do not support politicians who refuse to stand up for our rights. Like one popular sign at the National Equality March said: "Attention Democrats: the gay ATM is closed," and since then, a campaign has begun to cease all contributions to Democrats until they take concrete action on LGBT equality.

We must build a mass, independent, democratic, unapologetic movement from below, and to do that, we need you, your friends, fellow students, co-workers and thousands more people we have yet to meet. Join us not as passive supporters, but as agents in the shaping of our own collective destiny. History is on our side, and it shows us that such a movement can be built--despite what our high school textbooks tell us, history is made not by a few "great men," but by ordinary people who stand up and demand their rights.

We have come a long way. There are LGBT people today who remember when homosexuality was considered by psychiatrists to be a mental illness. Today, millions live out and proud, and millions more consider homophobia and transphobia to be unacceptable. We have a long struggle ahead, but we will get there. I hope you will join us in taking the next step on the road to equality together.