by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Rev. Shane Harris
Eric Fanning
Jennifer Restle and
her service dog
Mike Dee
Lily Rubenstein
Joan La Barbera
Community servants or
drug pushers? The PrEP T-shirt
(Pride staffer
Fernando Lopez in background)
San Diego Gay Men’s
Chorus
San Diego Pride Youth
Marching Band
San Diego’s
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride weekend kicked off big-time with a
well-attended rally Friday, July 15 at 6 p.m at the Marston Point main stage at
the Pride festival site near Sixth and Laurel in Balboa Park. The keynote speaker
was supposed to be U.S. Secretary of the Army Eric Fanning, the first openly
Queer person appointed to head a major branch of the U.S. military, but the
show was stolen by the impassioned church oratory of Rev. Shane Harris of the
San Diego branch of the National Action Network.
Citing not only
the murder of 49 mostly Latino and Queer people at the Pulse nightclub in
Orlando, Florida but police killings of African-American men in Baton Rouge,
Louisiana and a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, the shooting of five Dallas
police officers by an African-American gunman during an otherwise peaceful
Black Lives Matter protest in that city, and the latest alleged terror attack
on a civilian population in Nice, France, Rev. Harris called on the Black and
Queer communities to “stand together to fight for gun reform and police
reform.”
Rev. Harris,
whose group was founded by the controversial New York Black minister Rev. Al
Sharpton, said, “It’s time to break down the walls between the church and the
LGBT community once and for all.” He cited the examples of Martin Luther King,
Jr. and the little-known Viola Liuzzo, a white woman who came down to Selma,
Alabama to register Black voters in 1965 and was murdered, as people who
“fought for the voiceless.”
He made it clear
that, while other African-American ministers often say the Queer rights
movement “stole” their tactics from the African-American civil rights movement,
in his view “the LGBT community fought the fight and learned from the civil
rights movement. It’s time to bring the movements back together.” Rev. Harris
said he’s called out other Black ministers who called the Orlando shootings an
“act of God” and said the victims got what they deserved for being Queer. “That
is not the love of God,” he said. “I
slammed those pastors and said we will not represent that kind of hate.”
Rev. Harris said
the demands the Black and Queer community should unite around include gun
reform and police reform. “What happened in that club (in Orlando) should not
have happened,” he said. He also criticized police officers who are — or claim
to be — so scared by African-American men they feel a need to shoot them six
times even after they’ve already been
subdued and are on the ground.
The impassioned
oratory of Rev. Harris somewhat overshadowed the rally’s final speaker, U.S.
Secretary of the Army Eric Fanning. He joked about being an Army man bringing a
message of Queer pride to a Navy town, and said that including not only
active-duty servicemembers but also reservists and employees of private
contractors, the U.S. Army includes about 1.4 million people.
Fanning recalled
that he first joined the Army’s staff at the Pentagon in 1993 — the same year
the U.S. Congress imposed the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and then-President
Bill Clinton signed it into law. “I didn’t see many people like me, and there
didn’t seem to be many opportunities in national security,” Fanning said. “Now
there are many opportunities to live and serve with dignity.”
Though he
admitted the Pride celebration seems “bittersweet” after the events in Orlando
— which happened during Pride weekend in Fanning’s home town, Washington, D.C.
— along with Dallas, Baton Rouge, St. Paul and Nice, Fanning said, “We respond
to acts of cowardice with acts of confidence and pride.” Fanning mentioned two
of the Orlando victims, Tony Brown and Angel Cordelaro, who were active-duty
servicemembers in the U.S. Army — and another Army man who courageously
intervened and saved seven other people’s lives during the attack at Pulse.
When he was
invited to speak at San Diego Pride, Fanning said, “I thought about why it was
important for me to be here to promote the acceptance the Orlando shooter tried
to destroy. Orlando was an attack on America. Citizens here come together to
comfort those left behind. It’s important to remember that we’re all in this
together. To keep this country secure we have to draw on all our communities.”
Fanning also
said the U.S. military has a civil rights record of which it can be proud. He
noted that the military ended racial segregation in 1948 — “16 years before the
Civil Rights Act was passed” — and in 2011 San Diego’s Pride contained the
first-ever contingent of active-duty servicemembers, who marched even though
“don’t ask, don’t tell” was still in effect and they risked discharge. The next
year, the services not only allowed the contingent to go forward but let the
participants march in their uniforms.
Bisexuals Finally
Included
This was also
the year San Diego Pride finally acknowledged the Bisexual community — the
largest but also the most ignored and marginalized group within the “LGBT”
community, both by straights and Queers — by inviting an “out” Bi speaker to
address the rally. She was Jennifer Restle, who also represented the community
of people living with disabilities; she’s blind, and before she could start her
speech she had to work with her guide dog to get the animal to sit and hold
still so she could talk.
“Imagine a glass
that can hold 16 ounces and has eight ounces of water in it,” Restle said. “This
is my disability. The glass-half-full people see me doing ordinary tasks and
raise them to major accomplishments, and the glass-half-empty people see my
life as tragic because I’m blind. Why can’t it just be a glass with liquid in
it?”
Restle used a similar
metaphor to describe her sexuality. “Let’s pretend I’m attracted to both
genders equally,” she said. “Some people would say I’m half-straight, some that
I’m half-Gay. My question is why can’t it just be a glass of liquid, not cut up
into pieces of homo- and heterosexuality?”
Despite the
pretense of inclusion implied by the inclusion of “B” in “LGBT,” Restle said
mainstream Queer organizations are often hostile to Bisexuals and refuse to
help them. She also said the sense that Bi people aren’t welcome in either the
straight or Queer communities contributes to them having “the highest rates of
suicide, depression, poverty and abuse by relationship partners” of anyone in
the Queer community.
(For further
information on how Bisexuals are in many ways the most discriminated-against
members of the Queer community, see http://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2015/07/b-forgotten-letter.html.
For information supporting Restle’s claims about the adverse health effects of
anti-Bi discrimination, see http://www.news-medical.net/news/20150701/Rice-University-study-reveals-that-Gays-Lesbians-and-heterosexuals-have-better-health-than-Bisexuals.aspx?.)
Other speakers
included Mike Dee, president and chief executive officer of the San Diego
Padres baseball club, who said he had arranged the first “Pride Night” outreach
to the Queer community by a major-league baseball team during a previous stint
in the Padres’ organization in 2001. Dee had to work hard to mend fences with
the Queer community when at the 2015 Pride Night, the San Diego Gay Men’s
Chorus was brought on to sing the national anthem at the start of the game —
but a sound person cut them off and instead played a record of another
non-Queer performance of the anthem.
Dee’s speech
ignored the Pride Night anthem controversy (though Pride director Stephen
Whitburn, introducing him, mentioned it) and focused on the team’s outreach
efforts. “In 2015 we pledged with the San Diego Unified School District to
promote the best of athletics by making peole feel respected on and off the
field,” he said. “Major League Baseball is the first professional sports league
to name an openly Gay person as a director of social outreach: former San Diego
Padre Billy Bean. He came out in 1999 after his professional career ended. I
know Billy personally and he’s a major ambassador for professional sports and
the LGBT community.”
“Pride unites
us,” said Lily Rubenstein, 16-year-old Transgender activist and member of the
Mayor’s LGBT advisory board. “It’s always been our community’s secret weapon.
We have Pride to let LGBT’s know that there are people to support them. Pride
celebrations are landmarks. Think back to the time when Pride was something you
had to fight for. Pride is the culmination of dedicated fighting.” She praised
the California board of education for just having authorized teaching of Queer
history in the state’s public schools.
The rally was
kicked off by Queer historian Joan La Barbera of the San Diego LGBT Archives,
who presented an orthodox “it all started at Stonewall” version of Queer history
that typically ignored earlier Queer activism. Though the first known
Queer-rights organization in the U.S. was founded in Chicago in 1926 and
America’s history of continuous Queer activism started with Harry Hay and four
others founding the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in 1950, La Barbera’s
presentation and the name of the event itself — “Spirit of Stonewall” —
enshrined the pernicious myth that the entire U.S. Queer liberation movement
started when patrons at the Stonewall Inn dive bar in New York City in June
1969 fought back against a police raid. (Full disclosure: two of my closest
friends, Leo Laurence and Pat Brown, were among the leaders of militant
Queer-rights demonstrations in San Francisco in early 1969, months before the
so-called “beginning” of the movement at Stonewall.)
“Stonewall was
not a peaceful protest,” La Barbera conceded. “It was a riot against police
harassment, and it was led mostly by Trans women of color who are in fact our
foremothers.” (The “it all started at Stonewall” myth is often used to hail
Transgender people as the real founders of the Queer movement, and thereby to
marginalize the participation of Queer Leftists like Harry Hay and others in
launching U.S. Queer activism. It doesn’t marginalize the courage Sylvia Rivera,
Marcia P. Johnson and the other Trans people who fought at Stonewall to set the
record straight and acknowledge that just as the women’s movement was birthed
from women’s responses to sexism within the American Left, so was the Queer
movement partly a response to Leftist homophobia and a challenge to the Left to
live up to its promise of liberation for all people.)
Awards to Drug Dealers
As in previous
years, part of the business of the Pride rally was to hand out “Spirit of
Stonewall Awards” (the myth strikes again!) to various individuals and
organizations in the Queer community. The event MC asked for a particularly
supportive response when members of a group calling itself “#Be the Generation”
was given the Service Awards. Though they weren’t as big a presence in this
year’s rally as they were the previous year — when far more attendees were
wearing the “#Be the Generation” T-shirt — they showed off their four-part
response to AIDS, which while no longer epidemic in the Queer community is
still endemic and hits us harder than any other population.
“#Be the
Generation” allegedly highlights four responses to the continuing presence of
AIDS and the so-called Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) which supposedly
causes it in the Queer community: “FIGHT: Stigma, Fear and Shaming. TEST: Know Your HIV Status. TREAT: Get Undetectable. PROTECT: PrEP and Condoms.” According to the group’s propaganda, the campaign is
aimed at young people to get them to “be the generation” that stops the alleged
“transmission” of HIV and AIDS once and for all.
But the nub of
the campaign lies in the reference to “PrEP” in the fourth point. “PrEP” stands
for “pre-exposure prophylaxis,” a highly controversial campaign originally
approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2012 — though the groundwork
for it had been laid as early as the Berlin AIDS conference in 1993 — to get
people who test HIV negative to take
anti-HIV drugs anyway, despite their high cost and potentially ferocious
toxicities.
The principal
PrEP drugs are Truvada and Genvoya, made by Gilead Pharmaceuticals — whose
extortionate prices for hepatitis C treatments Horvani and Sarvoldi made them
poster children for pharmaceutical company greed. A 2015 study claimed nearly
100 percent effectiveness for Truvada in preventing HIV transmission from
positive people to their negative sex partners — but like many other studies in
the history of U.S. AIDS research, it was stopped early before the drug’s side
effects had a chance to kick in.
Later research (http://www.hivandhepatitis.com/hiv-prevention/hiv-prep/5434-eacs-2015-modest-bone-loss-seen-in-young-men-taking-truvada-for-pre-exposure-prophylaxis)
confirmed a severe risk of bone loss in patients taking Truvada. But neither
the risks involved in “pre-exposure prophylaxis,” the ultra-high cost of the
drugs nor the whole preposterousness of giving these powerful medications to
people who, even by the standards of the AIDS establishment, aren’t sick stopped the Pride organizers from hailing the drug pushers
of “#Be the Generation” by giving them a community service award.
Other community service award winners included Tita
Viveros, cross-border activist with the Queer community in Tijuana; Denise
Williams and Dana Toppel as “Inspirational Couple,” Dale Kelly Bankhead as
“Friend of Pride” (an award given for the straight person who has done the most
for San Diego’s Queer community, and one Bankhead has won so many times they
probably ought to retire it for her); Sue Reynolds as “Champion of Pride” for
her work trying to develop affordable housing for San Diego Queers; an
organization called MARYAH for “Philanthropy” because they raised money for the
Sunburst group home for Queer and other at-risk youth in Golden Hill; and
Michael Moore, current board chair of the Stepping Stone program for people
with alcohol or drug issues, as Community Grand Marshal.
The rally kicked off with the San Diego Gay Men’s Chorus
singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and ended with the San Diego Pride Youth
Marching Band playing cheerily amateur renditions of “Over the Rainbow”
(signature song of Judy Garland, whose death in June 1969 just days before the
Stonewall riots is partly credited with having sparked them — Queers were a
large part of her fan base and a lot of them felt pushed over the edge when
their bars were raided while they were still in mourning for her) and Lady
Gaga’s “Born This Way.”
