Lesbians and gays mobilize for second
LESBIAN & GAY LIBERATION organizations of Black lesbians and gays, and other lesbian/gay national minorities. Thanks to their insistence, the march has strongly linked the struggle for lesbian/gay freedom with battles against racism and sexism, and march on Washington included lesbian/gay national minorities in leadership roles at all levels.
Women make up half the national steering committee, with 50 percent representation on all leadership bodies.
IT IS NOW eight years since the first march on Washington
DC for lesbian and gay rights. Since then, the lesbian and gay community has been under ferocious attack, both from the state and from right wing religious and moral organizations.
Planning is now underway for a second national demonstration and a series of events aimed at challenging these attacks, which will be organized this autumn in an attempt to turn the tide of homophobia.
PETER DRUCKER & ANN MENASCHE
N 1979 over 100,000 lesbian and gay people and their supporters marched through the streets of
Washington DC. Although the country had already begun to turn to the right, the thousands gathered for this historic first march were militant and confident.
They attacked then-President Jimmy
Carter for his failure to ban anti-gay discrimination in the federal civil service and military; they demanded a national lesbian/gay rights law, though no such bill had even been reported out of a congressional committee; they demanded a repeal of all anti-gay laws and an end to anti-gay violence. The of the march propelled the success movement forward across the country, spurring new militancy and organizing efforts.
later,
Eight years the lesbian/gay community, decimated by AIDS and driven onto the defensive by Reaganism, is mobilizing again to turn back the tide. Organizing is already under way in virtually all 50 states for the second March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which will take place on October 11, 1987. The march has taken as its slogan, "For love and for life, we're not going back!" In fact, the march shows signs of starting the movement on a new course forward.
for the 1979 conference
Organizing was hampered by serious divisions, first because of the initial reluctance of more moderate organizations like the
National Lesbian and Gay Task Force to support it, and later because of the angry debates over the issue of sex between men and boys. (The final compromise call for rights for lesbian/gay youth led to walkouts from the coalition on both sides of the debate.) This year the issue has barely arisen.
By contrast, organizing for the 1987 march began early, was broadly representative from the beginning, and has had extraordinary success in reaching working agreements. Because of this unity the 1987 march is likely to mobilize many thousands more people than in 1979.
This show of unity does not mean that the march is based on a watereddown, lowest common denominator program. On the contrary, organizing has shown a definite tilt, both nationally and in several major cities, toward the movement's left wing.
The crucial early push toward the left came from
GCN
The most hotly debated issue so far has been the call for an end to US intervention in Central America. Over strong protests from leftists and national minorities, the national organizers finally voted not to include that call among the demands of the march. They did call for cutting the war budget in order to fund health care. They also allowed local coalitions to raise their own demands, and organizers in both New York and San Francisco have called for the US to get out of Central America.
Key demands for the march
The initial organizing conference resulted in a pages-long list of demands. Organizers have since managed to settle on a shorter list of key demands for use on march literature. These demands are:
• Legal recognition of lesbian and gay relationships. The same rights for lesbian and gay partners as for married heterosexual couples, including rights to child custody, foster parenting and adoption. Increased services for lesbian/gay youth.
• Repeal of all laws that make sodomy (anal and oral sex) between consenting adults a crime.
• A presidential order banning anti-gay discrimination by the federal government, particularly in the military and in immigration. • Passage of the congressional lesbian and gay rights bill. • An end to discrimination against people with AIDS, ARC, HIV positive status, or those perceived to have AIDS. Massive increase in funding
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September 14, 1987 • International Viewpoint
LESBIAN & GAY LIBERATION for AIDS education, research and patient care. Money for AIDS, not for war.
• Reproductive freedom, the right to control our own bodies and an end to sexist oppression.
• An end to racism in this country and apartheid in South Africa. "None of us will be free until we are all free."
Instead of relying on the October 11 march alone to educate the US about all these demands, the movement is planning five days of events (October 9-13) that will mobilize people around these specific issues and others as well.
AIDS used as excuse for moral crusades
The issue that rouses the most anger and anguish among gay people in the US now is AIDS. Tens of thousands have already died from the disease in the US alone, and hundreds of thousands of deaths are projected by the early 1990s: in large majority gay men, and disproportionately national minorities. The Reagan administration and Congress have increased funding for research and health care only slowly, inadequately and under intense pressure, while military spending has skyrocketed. They have resisted efforts to educate people about how to have sex in ways that will substantially reduce the risk of spreading AIDS (e.g. using condoms). Instead, they have used the epidemic as an excuse for moral crusades against sexual freedom and drugs, and for attacks on democratic rights.
Despite consensus among health authorities (including even right-wing Surgeon General Koop) that mandatory testing for the AIDS virus will only drive the disease underground, hinder education and help spread AIDS, recently Reagan has pushed for mandatory
- beginning with the most prisoners. The only purpose of such mandatory testing is to deprive people who are HIV positive of their rights and lay the basis for even more drastic, useless and dangerous measures, such as
The drive for testing has gone forward despite the fact that massive education on safe sex methods by gay organizations in San Francisco and New York has brought the spread of the virus to a virtual standstill in the gay communities there. In the early 1980s, 15-20 per cent of previously uninfected gay men proved positive for virus anti26 bodies each year. But the rate of new infections declined in 1986 to 6.6 per International Viewpoint • September 14, 1987 cent in New York and 4 per cent in San Francisco, and to only 1 per cent this year in both cities.
March organizers are responding to attacks, among other ways, with a creative AIDS Memorial Project. Panels 2 square meters in size, each with the name of someone who has died from AIDS, will be woven together into an enormous quilt that will be displayed on October 11 on the Capitol Mall, an event that should shake the country's conscience. For 40 hours beforehand. protestors will hold processions front of the Capitol and the White House carrying names of people killed by AIDS or by anti-gay violence.
Another event will protest against the Supreme Court's recent Hardwick decision, which affirmed the constitutionality of laws against "sodomy". (In a striking display of hypocrisy, the court upheld such laws' enforcement against homosexual couples, while refusing to rule on their use heterosexual - including married couples.) On October 13 protestors will blockade the Supreme Court in what could be one of the largest acts of civil disobedience in US history.
Of the dozens of other events occurring during these five days, one merits special notice: an October 12 planning meeting for a 1988 National Gay and Lesbian Rights Congress. This congress, following similar attempts after the 1979 march, will try to remedy the lack of any nationwide, mass lesbian/ gay organization in the US. (Existing "national" groups, such as the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force, are run by more or less self-selected boards and have only small, inactive memberships.) The formation of such an organization would help enormously to involve lesbian/gay people in national struggles and give the movement national clout.
The only disturbing sign is the reported plan to model the congress on the US Congress, with two representatives from each congressional district. This plan would drastically underrepresent lesbian/gay centers like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and
Boston, and skew the gathering to the
The lesbian/gay mobilization is relying on the weakening over the past year of Reaganism's base, beginning with the Republicans' loss of their Senate majority in 1986, and accelerating this year with the Contragate scandal. But the movement still has to reckon with the consequences of several years' offensive by the right wing
The Democratic Party, to which many radical as well as moderate lesbian/gay activists have ties, has responded to this offensive with large-scale capitulation. Especially after Walter Mondale's defeat in the 1984 presidential elecin which Reagan succeeded in labeling the Democrats as the party of "special interests" (particularly the labor movement), the Democrats have energetically to dissociate themselves from progressive move-
Last year, the Democratic Party stripped its lesbian/gay caucus of its right to representation on leading party bodies and financial support. Despite Democratic control of both houses of Congress and many state legislatures, only one state - Wisconsin has ever passed a lesbian/gay rights law. Of the many contenders already in the race for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, only one of any prominence, Jesse Jackson, has been at all forthcoming on lesbian/gay issues. Despite Jackson's past history of religious reservations about the gay "lifestyle", many left-leaning activists are supporting him enthusiastically, partly from a desire for unity with Jackson's substantial Black progressive base. But in 1988, as in 1984, Jackson's Rainbow Coalition will be hamstrung by its commitment to staying inside the Democratic Party and accepting the verdict of its convention. That convention is likely to lean even further rightward in 1988 than four years ago. Once again, all the Rainbow activists' efforts will be wasted.
Mass actions provide the best hope
Mass actions like the march on Washington provide the best hope for creating a strong, militant movement to the left of the two bourgeois parties. Ultimately, the lesbian/gay movement will find its voice only • in an independent party that unites it with national minorities, feminists and the working class. *