IN THE AFTERMATH of the passage of California’s Proposition 8, a new generation of activists emerged to protest the loss of the right to marry one’s same-sex partner. The GLBT media has dubbed this new wave of activism “Stonewall 2.0.” This historic political involvement of young people was catalyzed by the remarkable energy generated by the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. A newfound passion for political engagement among young Americans, coupled with collective anger over Proposition 8, has sparked a national movement inextricably tied to Join the Impact, a new group that coordinated a 300-city, 50-state protest on November 15, 2008.
As it became clear in the 48 hours after election day that marriage equality had been crushed in California, Willow Witte, an activist from Cleveland, was swept up in a vast on-line conversation known as “tweeting.” Hundreds of thousands if not millions were speaking out in the virtual Town Hall that the Internet makes possible. “I was feeling really strongly that I wanted to be there. It was a personal blow. I felt this major need to do something about it and saw others feeling the same thing,” said Witte.
With an intense urge to take to the streets and protest in solidarity with GLBT Californians, she systematically e-mailed the local GLBT rights organizations in Cleveland. Immediately after sending out those e-mails at 2 AM on November 6, 2008, she forwarded the same message to friends across the country. Amy Balliet, a Seattle resident, responded. Together, Willow and Amy resolved to take action themselves without waiting for a major organization to organize a protest in response to Proposition 8. Willow stated the organizing philosophy succinctly: “People felt there wasn’t a place for the grassroots and there needs to be many ways to be involved. There isn’t another organization that’s doing grassroots organizing where people can have direct involvement.” Thus did Willow and Amy get Join the Impact started. A website was created (jointheimpact.com) and a call went out in every state to protest Prop. 8 simultaneously across the country in a week’s time. Blogs were contacted and the GLBT mainstream media were alerted. Activists everywhere independently created Facebook event pages to publicize and plan the nationwide event. The call to protest went viral and received a major boost as gay media personality and blogger Perez Hilton ran with the story. This sudden surge of activity enabled rallies to be organized in cities nationwide in barely a week’s time. One of those cities was Boston, where I was one of the original planners. A handful of us, strangers to each other at the time, coalesced to lead this endeavor. The principal organizing tool we used was the social medium Facebook, which allows users to appeal easily to networks of on-line “friends” with the click of a mouse. On November 15, 2008, some five to seven thousand people showed up at Boston City Hall Plaza to hear a hastily arranged array of speakers, including three members of the U.S. Congress. The mood was electric. Simultaneously hundreds of thousands of GLBT activists and our allies converged on city halls from Maine to Hawaii. This incipient grassroots movement was groundbreaking in that the Internet provided the mechanism to bring complete strangers together in common cause. Some would refer to such a coalescence as being “netroots”-based. In the tradition of the earliest gay rights organizations to form after Stonewall, Join the Impact was open to everyone. People everywhere were urged to take part and to make their voices heard. Join the Impact is a bottom-up organization; the ideas and impetus come from individual activists, not a hierarchical leadership. The resulting energy was revitalized by the extraordinary success of the November 15th rallies. For the first time, a moment of GLBT activism was covered as a local story by hundreds of newspapers simultaneously across the country. New events quickly followed: § A “Day Without A Gay” protest on December 10 was conceived by a resident of West Hollywood, California, and pitched to Join The Impact, which promoted the effort through its new on-line network. The organizers asked gay people not to report to work and to call in “gay,” to show how integral gay Americans are to American society. In addition, participants were asked to use that time to volunteer for community causes. § “Light Up the Night For Equality” featured candlelight vigils in busy commercial areas at the height of the Christmas shopping season to send an understated but clear message that GLBT people are being treated like second-class citizens. In Boston, a hundred people turned out in Copley Square on the Saturday before Christmas in the middle of a snowstorm. § A national protest calling for the repeal of DOMA, the federal Defense Of Marriage Act, occurred on January 10, 2009. I came up with the idea for this event to take place ten days before the inauguration of President Obama to make the case for GLBT equality to be a priority for the new administration with its promise of change. At the Boston rally, U.S. Representative Barney Frank addressed the crowd and outlined the agenda for the 111th Congress: “We’re going to do three things in Congress: first, a hate crimes bill; next, legislation on employment discrimination; and after the troops come home, an end to ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’” The organizing for these coordinated national events happened in a matter of days via on-line networking tools such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs, e-mails, and text messages. That’s precisely why “Stonewall 2.0” is so revolutionary: hundreds of thousands can easily and inexpensively be mobilized across the country at short notice as the need arises. A new generation has become permanently engaged in the struggle for equality. I have witnessed this change as so many people in my age cohort have suddenly become radicalized. Young people have been awakened from political apathy and are on fire to work for equality. New associations and leaders came together in a matter of weeks. Ordinary GLBT people who were never engaged before were coming to meetings, organizing events, and participating in social change. The feeling was one of exhilaration. As the alias “Stonewall 2.0” implies, this coalescence is reviving a forty-year tradition of GLBT community organizing in the struggle for civil rights and equality. Young activists today are keenly aware of movement history and eager to build upon past successes. The Stonewall riots of 1969, the community backlash against Anita Bryant’s campaign of hate, the election of Harvey Milk to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, the shock over his assassination and the White Night riots sparked by the virtual exoneration of his murderer—all were early milestones that we look to. The 1979 March on Washington brought out thousands of newly liberated people bursting through closet doors to become activists in their local communities. The AIDS crisis energized the next wave of queer people, who formed ACT-UP and took to the streets to demand medical attention and humane treatment. Matthew Shepard’s martyrdom in the fall of 1998 prompted mass outrage and a collective sadness, even as the reality of anti-gay hate crimes burst into the national consciousness as never before. The organizing landscape today is of course very different from the one that prevailed in Harvey Milk’s time. Harvey’s openly gay nephew Stuart Milk said that Harvey “would’ve been so excited” with these new technological changes “and would’ve been on Facebook with 10,000 friends responding to every single person, especially a younger person.” As it happens, I located Stuart Milk for this article through the networking capabilities of Facebook. The history of social change movements is never linear. Since the original wave of community organizing that began with Stonewall, we’ve made tremendous if uneven progress toward GLBT equality, not only in the law and politics but also in American culture at large. Positive change has come through the courts, state legislatures, the private sector, churches, and community-based organizations, all predicated on the willingness of individuals to be open and honest about their sexuality. Greater understanding of who we are came through one-on-one conversations with family, friends, and strangers. The impetus also came from our channeled anger in the form of marches, rallies, boycotts, guerilla theatre, blogging, e-mailing, Facebooking, and other innovations in community organizing and technology. Our gains thus far have been manifest in myriad ways, and will continue because our demand for equality is relentless and constantly evolving. The community is still coming to terms with the passage of Proposition 8, which uncomfortably coincided with the election of President Obama. But the dream of marriage equality is powerful enough to sustain us through these challenging times. We suffered a stinging loss in California, to be sure, but love will win out in the end, whether through the courts or the initiative of the people themselves. Moving forward, we can learn from that defeat. The Proposition 8 battle was eerily similar to the controversy in California over Proposition 6, the “Briggs Initiative,” in Harvey Milk’s day. It was this 1978 referendum, which would have banned homosexuals from teaching in California public schools, that energized Milk’s campaign for supervisor in that year’s election. Yet a stark difference in tactics was evident this time around. During the fight against Proposition 6, Harvey made sure that gay people were highlighted in the successful statewide campaign. By contrast, in 2008 gay and lesbian couples were all but invisible in the anti-8 campaign. Stuart Milk commented, “I think that was a very positive lesson. One thing my uncle was absolute about was that ‘this was who I am.’” By avoiding explicit representations of gay people in happy, loving relationships, it seemed that we were trying to hide something from the general public rather than openly reveal our lives to them. Victory will ultimately be ours, not just in California but across America, because the tide of history is on our side. Younger people are more supportive of GLBT rights than their parents were. My generation grew up with Will & Grace on TV and gay-straight alliances in high school. More and more young people are living their lives openly and proudly; the closet is increasingly a thing of the past. The repressive world that Harvey Milk and the Stonewall generation grew up in and fought so valiantly to change has passed away forever. Young people nowadays are confidently self-expressive, proud to show off all the wonderful colors of the rainbow. We’re not afraid any more, and with that transformation in consciousness, we have already won. New on-line technologies are bringing us to that day sooner than the original Stonewall rioters could ever have imagined.
