by MARK GABRISH
CONLAN
Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
The San Diego
Alliance for Marriage Equality (S.A.M.E.) held its second annual fundraiser
Friday, December 9 at the Bamboo Lounge sushi bar in Hillcrest, with a full
program of entertainers and a short speech by Michelle “Jersey” Deutsch of
Canvass for a Cause and Occupy San Diego. Deutsch was arrested and sprayed with
chemical Mace in Civic Center Plaza by San Diego police on October 14, a week
after Occupy San Diego started occupying the plaza, and S.A.M.E. decided to
give half the fundraiser’s proceeds to Deutsch to pay for her medical bills
from the attack.
The other half
went to the defense fund for the Equality 9, nine S.A.M.E. members and
supporters who were arrested at the San Diego County Clerk’s office August 19,
2010 to protest the county’s continued refusal to give same-sex couples
marriage licenses despite a federal judge’s ruling that Proposition 8, which
banned legal recognition of same-sex marriages in California, is
unconstitutional.
“LGBT [Queer]
grassroots groups like Canvass for a Cause and S.A.M.E. should not be
overshadowed by $40 million corporate-sponsored campaigns, but we are,” Deutsch
told the people who attended the fundraiser. “In 38 states Transgender people
can still be fired from their jobs for being Trans, and in 29 states Gay people
can be fired from their jobs for being Gay. … We don’t have marriage rights in
California. In several states across the country, we don’t have adoption rights
and hospital visitation rights. … As individuals, we’re denied housing,
employment benefits, employment in general. This is a summary of the reasons
why groups like Canvass for a Cause and S.A.M.E. need to be involved in the
Occupation.”
Deutsch faulted
not only anti-Queer groups but less radical Queer organizations who are
themselves funded by major corporations. “We don’t have $10,000 coming from
Target,” she said. “In fact, we’re trying to sue them. So we do want to protest down there [at Civic Center Plaza
and wherever else Occupy stages demonstrations]. We are protesting down there. We cannot depend on a lot of
the groups that fought with us [against] Prop. 8, because a lot of those groups
are corporate-sponsored.”
According to
Deutsch, the incident that led the police to attack her began when she and her
friends at Occupy, including S.A.M.E. president Cecile Veillard (one of the
Equality 9), witnessed police attacking other Occupiers in an attempt to clear
out the tents members of Occupy had set up in the plaza. “We were peacefully
protesting,” she said. “I could look to my left and right and see people’s arms
being twisted … [The police] were kicking people in the groins and grabbing
people by the backs of their hands, and pulling people to the ground so they
could choke them.”
Deutsch said
that there were news cameras from two local TV stations, the NBC and Fox
affiliates, and therefore a lot of the police assaults on Occupiers took place
low to the ground so the cameras couldn’t photograph them. So she started
yelling “Brutality!” at the camera operators, trying to get their attention so
they would photograph what she was seeing. “I saw my friends getting the crap
beat out of them next to me,” Deutsch said. “And there’s nothing you can do.
You can’t fight back against the police. None of us did that. None of us put
our arms up against them.”
According to
Deutsch, the police Maced her to shut her up and keep her from directing the
camera operators toward the assaults on her friends. “I was Maced really close
to my face, like within three inches of my face, for a good five seconds at
least,” she recalled. “It was so close to my face that you really can’t catch
it on camera, because the officer was bigger than me.” After the attack, she
said, “I was literally blinded for about two hours. I was laying on the ground,
everybody else was still protesting, and I couldn’t see anything.”
Deutsch said she
returned home a few hours later, only she still felt symptoms from being Maced
— complicated by her chronic asthma, since the Mace had triggered an asthma
attack. “I woke up in the middle of the night with a bloody nose,” she said.
Her partner Lauren and Megan, a nurse who lives next door, convinced Deutsch to
go to the emergency room at Scripps Hospital — where her ordeal continued.
The doctors and
nurses at Scripps, Deutsch said, “were being really nice and treating me really
well until they said, ‘What do you mean, you got Maced?’ The second they heard
I had been Maced by the police, they were not very helpful. It really turned
around how the doctors and nurses were treating me, to the point where we
called our neighbor, nurse Megan, and we said, ‘What should we do? They’re not
treating me right. What should they actually be doing?’ And she helped us tell
them what I needed.”
Local
singer-songwriter Joshua Napier performed one of his intense, powerful sets,
including the Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and several of his
politically themed originals. The program also featured the debut performance
by the San Diego People’s Revolutionary Choir, which included three members of
the Equality 9 — Cecile Veillard, Sean Bohac and Chuck Stemke — singing classic
working people’s songs, including one called “We’re Bound for San Diego” that
comes from the 1912 Free Speech Fight. This was a year-long action staged by
the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the radical anarchist union
nicknamed the “Wobblies,” who set up soapboxes in San Diego’s traditional free
speech zone at Fifth and E Streets downtown and were met with police-sanctioned
violence and a city ordinance prohibiting free speech in the area.
Set to the
melody of “The Wearing of the Green” — itself an old song of the Irish
revolutionary struggle against British colonialism — “We’re Bound for San
Diego” was published by the IWW and used as a recruiting tool to bring members
and supporters to San Diego. Those who attempted to answer the call were met by
vigilante groups on the outskirts of town, where they were beaten and sometimes
killed. In the context of the S.A.M.E. event, the last line of the song — “We’ll
whip old San Diego if it takes 100 years” (“if it takes us 20 years” in the original
published lyric) — seemed almost unbearably ironic given the way the police had
treated Deutsch and other Occupy protesters.
