Proposition 8: Gay Marriage Ban Inspires New Wave of Activists

By JESSE McKINLEY

Published: December 9, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — They’re calling it Stonewall 2.0.

Outraged by California voters’ ban on same-sex marriage, a new wave of advocates, shaken out of a generational apathy, have pushed to the forefront of the gay rights movement, using freshly minted grass-roots groups and embracing not only new technologies but also old-school methods like sit-ins and sickouts.

Matt Palazzolo, 23, a self-described “video artist-actor turned gay activist,” founded one group, Equal Roots Coalition, with a group of friends about 10 days ago. “I’d been focused on other things in my life,” Mr. Palazzolo said. “Then Nov. 4 happened, and it woke me up.”

Often young and politically inexperienced, the new campaigners include an unlikely set of leaders, among them a San Francisco chess teacher, a search-engine marketer from Seattle and a former contestant on “American Gladiators,” who jokingly suggested that he had become involved in the movement as a way of making up for his poor performance on the show.

“We’re a gay couple in West Hollywood, neither of us involved in activism, but we just wanted to help,” said Sean Hetherington, 30, a stand-up comic who was the first openly gay contestant ever to do battle, however briefly, in the Gladiator Arena. “And we were amazed at what happened.”

Mr. Hetherington and his companion were among several people surprised by the strength of positive reaction after starting Web sites geared toward a demonstration planned for Wednesday, “Day Without a Gay.” Its organizers are asking gay rights supporters to avoid going to work by “calling in gay” and volunteering in the movement instead.

Many grass-roots leaders say the emergence of new faces, and acceptance of tactics that are more confrontational, amount to an implicit rejection of the measured approach of established gay rights groups, a course that, some gay men and lesbians maintain, allowed passage of the ban, Proposition 8.

“I think we are demanding as a community that we democratize our processes and ensure we all have a voice,” said Molly McKay, media director of the volunteer group Marriage Equality USA. “Because we are not a campaign. We are a movement.”

The executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Kate Kendell, a member of the No on 8 campaign’s executive committee, said the criticism was understood.

“Even from my vantage point, I would have a wish list of things I would have done differently,” Ms. Kendell said, adding that she would have preferred “to give our community a greater level of engagement.”

Now, however, the ballot initiative’s passage has forced many in the gay community “out of our stupor” and opened the door for new leaders, she said. “It’s totally legitimate to say that the normal way of doing things did not get us to the finish line,” Ms. Kendell said. “And now some of those groups need to move over a couple of lanes to make room.”

On Tuesday, another group behind the failed campaign, Equality California, announced that it would add several new board members to reflect a surge in interest. The group has also added two “faith leaders,” reflecting the opinion of many critics that the campaign should have courted the religious vote.

The new activists have impressed some gay rights veterans.

“They’ve shown a clear ability to turn out large numbers of people,” said Cleve Jones, a longtime gay rights advocate and labor organizer. “It’s also clear that they are skeptical of the established L.G.B.T. organizations. And I would say they have reason to be.”

The ban, which passed with 52 percent of the vote, overturned a decision by the California Supreme Court in May legalizing same-sex marriage. The same court is currently considering a challenge to Proposition 8.

But many activists seem unwilling to wait for a legal solution and have planned a series of events to keep the issue in the public eye, including a nationwide candlelight vigil later this month, a Million Gay March in Washington next spring and continued protests at county clerks’ offices throughout California.

“We’re doing an end run around the mainstream organizations that run our causes,” said David Craig, a movie producer who is an organizer of Wednesday’s “call in gay” protest. “And the Internet has given us the tool to create these events.”

Indeed, in much the same way a previous generation used phone trees and megaphones, Amy Balliet used Facebook and Twitter to spread the word about protests on Nov. 15 that drew tens of thousands of people in scores of cities and towns across the nation.

Ms. Balliet said the skills she used had been learned in her work at a search-engine marketing firm in Seattle. “I’m good at driving traffic to Web sites; that’s what I do,” said Ms. Balliet, 26, who with a friend, Willow Witte, founded a group called Join the Impact last month.

She added that their impatience with the status quo had played a part. “We said: ‘Why are we going to wait for the organizations to have a protest? They’re going to have to go through all their bureaucracies to get approval. Why don’t we just do it?’ ”

The sudden burst of energy has drawn some comparisons to demonstrations during the early days of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. But Larry Kramer, the playwright and founder of ACT UP, which used confrontational tactics to fight for money for AIDS treatment and research, said advances in treating the disease had, somewhat incongruously, robbed the gay rights movement of broader political momentum.

“For activism to work, you have to be scared and you have to be angry,” Mr. Kramer said. “Nobody’s frightened anymore. The drugs have taken care of that.”

Still, many current activists seem to be enrolled in crash courses in protest politics, with almost daily organizational meetings in cities across California. Some also study the arc of the gay rights movement, which custom dates from the riots at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, in 1969.

“I see a lot more people reading history books now,” Mr. Palazzolo said.

Quite a few activists said they had also been inspired by the acclaimed film “Milk,” which chronicles the fight by a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Harvey Milk (played by Sean Penn), to beat back a 1978 ballot measure that would have barred gay teachers from California’s public schools.

Justin Lenzi, a 23-year-old chess coach who attends San Francisco State University, said he saw Mr. Milk, who was murdered inside City Hall here shortly after the 1978 election, as a model for activism. So do others in his social set.

“I’m seeing a lot of people at my university, either gay or straight, who want to be part of my cause,” he said.

The new campaigners are also showing a willingness to learn. Robin Tyler, 66, a lesbian activist in Los Angeles, said she had been invited to speak at a meeting of grass-roots groups on Saturday and was inspired by the younger generation’s efforts to take the movement “into the streets.”

“The grandchildren in the movement are like us,” Ms. Tyler said. “I told them, ‘We just had to skip the generation above you.’ ”

Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry, a gay rights group in New York, said he applauded the sudden involvement of “people who were either complacent or not reached” during the campaign against Proposition 8. But he cautioned that the advances and methods of older groups should not be discounted.

“Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” Mr. Wolfson said. “It’s not so much a failure of leadership; it’s an opportunity to bring more people in.”

Mr. Palazzolo, the activist-actor-video artist, said it had taken Proposition 8 to reawaken political consciousness that he and many peers abandoned during college.

“We’ve been spoiled,” he said. “Because while we knew we’d been discriminated against in the past, we’d never felt it until now.”

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Alan Davidson is the author of the Free report

"Body Breakthroughs for Life Breakthroughs: How to Peak Your

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Harvey Milk: 30 Years Later a Film is Made

LOS ANGELES — One morning in 1978 a disgruntled San Francisco politician, Dan White, climbed through a City Hall window, assassinated Mayor George Moscone, then shot and killed an openly gay adversary on the city’s Board of Supervisors named Harvey Milk.

It was a fractured moment in a troubled time and place. Memories of it soon will be roiling the Oscar race.

On Oct. 28 Focus Features expects to introduce its film “Milk,” directed by Gus Van Sant with Sean Penn in the title role, at a gala in San Francisco hosted by local luminaries, at least one of whom — Senator Dianne Feinstein, then the president of the board of supervisors — was just steps away when Mr. Milk and Mayor Moscone were shot. The movie will begin playing in some theaters on Nov. 26, just ahead of the 30th anniversary of the killings on Nov. 27, then gain wider release as the awards season gets under way.

Already the film is drawing attention as an early contender in the coming Oscar race. Following early screenings, for instance, Hollywood insiders and others have been startled by Mr. Penn’s picture-perfect rendering of Mr. Milk, a politician who was at once gawky, ambitious and unforgettable to those whose lives he touched. “Sean’s portrayal of Harvey is so beautifully right,” Cleve Jones, a Milk friend who is played in the film by Emile Hirsch, said in a phone interview.

Yet the movie presents no small challenge for Focus, the specialty division owned by NBC Universal that two years ago pushed its gay-theme “Brokeback Mountain” to the cusp of Oscar glory with eight nominations, only to see “Crash” win best picture.

This time around, studio marketers are wrestling with an inherently political film at a time when audiences have been wary of them. Only last weekend the combined star power of Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe was not enough to save an issues-oriented thriller, “Body of Lies,” which opened poorly for Warner Brothers.

Focus and Mr. Van Sant will have to connect millions of filmgoers with a world that could seem weirdly disconnected, even back then. Only nine days before the murders, for example, the Rev. Jim Jones, whose People’s Temple had become influential in San Francisco politics, had orchestrated the death of more than 900 followers and others at Jonestown in Guyana.

The publishing heiress Patricia Hearst, meanwhile, was tucked in a Bay Area prison, the consequence of her engaging in a bank robbery for the Symbionese Liberation Army, which had kidnapped her.

“You’re giving me an acid flashback to all the chatter before ‘Brokeback,’ ” said James Schamus, chief executive of Focus, responding to a question about the universal message in Mr. Milk’s struggles. Those could turn on matters as weighty as gay rights, or as slight as an ordinance requiring dog owners to clean up after their pets.

“Harvey said, ‘This is a quest for everybody’s rights,’ ” Mr. Schamus said. “That was his genius.”

If the ranch hands of “Brokeback” were subdued, nothing about Mr. Milk was. He loudly insisted that gay people should be out of the closet, at a time when public homosexuality was largely confined to San Francisco and a few like-minded enclaves.

Mr. Milk’s grandest political battle was his successful fight against a California initiative that would have banned gay teachers from the state’s public schools. His roughest was the backroom scrap in which he helped to block Mr. White’s reappointment to a supervisor’s post from which he had resigned two weeks earlier. Mayor Moscone was planning to discuss that decision publicly on the day of the murders.

(Upon Mr. Moscone’s death Ms. Feinstein, as president of the board of supervisors, became mayor, propelling her political rise. Mr. White would later use a “Twinkie defense,” in which his junk-food diet was cited as representative of his diminished capacity, to avoid conviction for first-degree murder; his conviction on the lesser counts of manslaughter sparked the so-called White Night riots in the city.)

According to the film’s producers and others, some of the political intricacies were whittled from Dustin Lance Black’s script. Though the People’s Temple had supported Mr. Milk, for instance, Mr. Jones was largely cut. “It would take so much time to explain to people who Jim Jones was,” said Dan Jinks, who with his business partner Bruce Cohen are among the movie’s producers.

What remained, according to Mr. Jinks, was the story of a “regular guy” — before politics, Mr. Milk was best known as co-owner of a camera store in the Castro district of San Francisco — who decided to make a difference.

The documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk,” directed by Rob Epstein, won the Oscar for best feature documentary in 1985. “Execution of Justice,” shown on the Showtime cable network in 1999, was a drama based on the murders.

Mr. Van Sant’s film came together suddenly last year after he and other filmmakers, Bryan Singer and Oliver Stone among them, had struggled for two decades with various attempts to find a feature film in Mr. Milk’s life.

Mr. Black, himself a director, bypassed those earlier efforts, many of them based on Randy Shilts’s book “The Mayor of Castro Street,” and began researching an original script with the help of those who knew Mr. Milk. In early 2007 one of those friends, Mr. Jones, showed the script to Mr. Van Sant, whom he had known for years.

Mr. Van Sant, speaking by telephone, said he signed on partly because Mr. Black had managed to confine the story to the brief and heady period that preceded Mr. Milk’s death. “He made choices,” Mr. Van Sant said.

Mr. Penn joined up, as did Mr. Jinks and Mr. Cohen. They next connected with Groundswell Productions and its chief executive, Michael London, who in turn joined Focus in financing a film that cost a relatively modest $20 million or so to make.

Yet “Milk” acquired a kind of epic quality as much of San Francisco became involved. “It took on almost Tolstoyan proportions,” Mr. Schamus said of the movie’s familial sprawl.

A number of Mr. Milk’s aging associates are not only portrayed in the film, they also have bit parts. Danny Nicoletta, who worked in Mr. Milk’s camera shop, for instance, is played by Lucas Grabeel of “High School Musical” and, in turn, plays Carl Carlson, an aide to Mr. Milk who was one of the last to see him alive. In addition Mr. Nicoletta advised Mr. Black on the script and worked as the film’s still photographer.

In one more twist this month’s premiere, a benefit for various gay and lesbian youth groups, will open with a screening at the Castro Theater, near the site of Mr. Milk’s old camera shop, and will end with dinner and dancing at City Hall, where he died.

The moral in all of it, Mr. Van Sant said, is ultimately political. “It’s an illustration of pretty extreme grass-roots politics,” he said of his film’s message, “that you can do it.”

But others are hoping that he has found the beating heart in Mr. Milk.

“He wasn’t Mother Teresa,” Tom Ammiano, a San Francisco supervisor who appears in the movie, said of Mr. Milk. “He just connected with people, one by one.”

Love your way... you are Brilliant!

Alan Davidson is the author of the Free report

"Body Breakthroughs for Life Breakthroughs: How to Peak Your

Physical, Emotional, Mental, Moral, and Spiritual IQs for a

Sensational Life"

available at www.throughyourbody.com

Alan is also the author of Body Brilliance:

Mastering Your Five Vital Intelligences (IQs)

http://bodybrilliancebook.com/bbb_movie/

Watch the Body Brilliance Movie