scene early today at the support truck bike for an “unpermitted” march RHA/Queer Justice League contingent
[more tomorrow]
Category: Queer
NYC: yes to “street fairs”, no to homo festival
the view from the parlor today
It’s not the pedestrian street we had in mind.
We awakened this morning to the sweet refrain of amplified hawkers of corporately-manufactured goods, and the stench of greasy food. Yes it’s another so-called “neighborhood street fair” in Chelsea. We get at least half a dozen each year below our windows and on the blocks radiating from the intersection one hundred feet to the west.
The city authorities seem to love these things; the neighborhoods don’t. These regular floods of open stalls have absolutely nothing to do with the people or small businesses whose apartments and storefronts they engulf: New Yorkers really don’t knit tubesocks in home workshops and we don’t shuck corn on our fire escapes.
My real point in writing this is to point out the hypocrisy of a multi-ethnic City like this one continuing to permit these abominations, which corrupt the concept of a genuine neighborhood fair, while at the same time refusing to permit the queer community to hold their Pride Festival tomorrow, which happens only once a year, in the very queer (okay, mostly only “gay”) community of Chelsea.
The content of that last paragraph comes from Barry, who made the deliciously-derisive juxtaposition immediately after I told him what I had seen outside our front windows.
trans march led by police wagon, loads of handcuffs ready
One of our sources tell us that tonight’s Trans March was phenomenal!
Donald Grove commented on Bloggy’s post about the Audre Lord Project‘s experience trying to secure a permit for a transgender march tonight. This is the text of this queer supporter’s brief report:
I just finished the Trans March, and I am a bit too footsore to do the Drag
March. But I am thrilled to say that the Trans March was very VERY big. I
would guess around 500 people. Lots of trans folks with a strong mix of
gender non-conforming and queer support. It was excellent!
We got to march in the street most of the way, which was smart, because the
march was so big. But we were preceded almost the entire way by a paddy
wagon, with smiling cops holding their bundles of plastic handcuffs. I
suppose they could make some screwy stupid statement about protecting the
march from bashers, but who would buy that? They were their with the paddy
wagon first because they wanted to send a message to that uppity Audre
Lorde Project for taking them to court.
Well screw the cops! The march was huge, and all the police accomplished
was to look puffy, pasty and pointless in the company of so many awesome,
sexy, spirited gender-self-defining folks, both young and old, of many
colors!!!
I wasn’t there, but I have to add my own wee commnent:
This has got to stop! A happy group of peaceful marchers who have been brutalized by the police for millenia were forced to accept the deliberately-confrontational imposition of an NYPD police wagon, together with its armed and restraint-laden crew, as their very visible “grand marshal” when they chose to parade through their own neighborhoods.
Were there police snipers on the roof, like during the Puerto Rico Day Parade? I’m also surprised that our guardians of public order don’t seem to have swept up spectators who were wearing their pink or lavender gang colors.
While we’re on the subject of marches and marshals, does anyone else find it problematic, if no longer surprising, that both of the grand marshals in the really big queer march on Sunday, Sharon Kleinbaum and Troy Perry, are members of the clergy?
[image of NYC police at the 2004 RNC from Theoria via Daily Kos]
panel on radical history of Lower East Side
ACT UP demonstration for access to clean needles, seventeen years ago
After yesterday’s post, which was totally connected to current political activism, I’m going to turn back and examine what the territory looked like in the 80’s and 90’s.
Although many of us are still busy working on some of the very same issues which engaged New York activists, writers, artists, and residents in the previous two decades, it would make no sense at all if we were to ignore a radical activist history which can still inform what we do today.
On Tuesday, June 26, the New York Book Club at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and the Gotham Center for New York City History at CUNY are hosting a panel discussion in the Museum. Called “Resistance: A Radical History of the Lower East Side”, the event’s participants will be Jay Blotcher, Al Orensanz and Michael Rosen. The moderator will be Clayton Patterson.
I think all of these people (with very interesting but quite different backgrounds in the same neighborhood) are contributors to a new book with the same title, a collection of writings and images. Okay, it sounds like it’s also a book signing, but on Tuesday it seems both oral and written history will be shared with those who stop by.
I know Jay well, originally through ACT UP, where he directed media relations, but in addition to his AIDS activism he has also worked as a collage artist, documentary filmmaker, journalist and publicist. If he’s involved in something like this, it’s likely to be at least worth a detour.
The address is 108 Orchard Street, near Delancey, and the time is from 6 to 8 pm.
[image from the film “Clean Needles Save Lives: Drug Users Doing It For Ourselves” via Creative Time]
AVIS Preferred
nice beltline
It took us at least 45 minutes to turn over the keys to our rental car here in Barcelona yesterday, but there was also this pleasant distraction at the counter immediately ahead of us.
He and his friend appeared to be Italian.
Gore Vidal in New York
Don Bachardy Gore Vidal 1963 pencil and ink wash
“From George Washington to George Bush makes a monkey out of Darwin. [pause] I’m now a creationist.”
And so, punctuating himself with a mischievous smile and a composed chuckle, did Gore Vidal introduce himself before speaking to a group of enthusiastic admirers (many of whom had brought stacks of the great man’s books for his signing). The scene was the Borders store on Columbus Circle yesterday afternoon. The iconic, and iconoclastic, Leftist author, historian and “homosexualist” was in town because he was being honored with the first PEN/Borders Literary Service Award during last night’s PEN Literary Gala.
Vidal reminisced about the era in America past when, if you had scoundrels in office, “you’d hold and election and you’d get them out.” He spoke lovingly of his close relationship, as a boy who loved reading, to his blind Grandfather, the Oklahoma Senator Thomas Pryor Gore, who played an extremely significant role in our federal system as a player in a very different political age. But not completely different, as he indicated when he told us that although the populist, anti-foreign war Senator was an atheist, he had the good sense not to share that fact with his constituents.
Knowing the audience would be interested in his opinion on the subject of the next election, he encouraged us to “Vote for Al Gore,” insisting that Gore did win the 2000 election and was only prevented from assuming the office by the Supreme Court. He also dropped a good word for Pelosi and Kucinich.
He told us he never reads at a book signing, since it’s enough work just to write them, and he would prefer leaving the reading to others. So he asked for the mind or sense of the audience; what did we want to talk about about? There was a brief hesitation, so I shouted out, “revolution!”, which seemed to take him by surprise for a moment. He answered, Revolutions don’t usually end well”, and went on to look for another subject before I thought to retort with a list of those that did, restructurings all provoked by the impossibility of any moderate alternative.
For someone who dismisses the idea of rebellion so lightly, he fails to offer the rest of us any hope, any alternative. “We have rogues in high office and no one wants to do anything about them”, he bellowed. We were very fortunate in our founders, but today “We have no republic”.
Answering a question about 9/11, he admitted, “I’m not a conspiracy theorist; I’m a conspiracy analyst.” He said that this gang in the White House would never have been able to pull it off; everything they do is screwed up completely. On the other hand, he suggested, it would be possible for them to have just stood aside when they learned it was happening. “I’d like to blame them”, Vidal concluded, but he wouldn’t go any further.
[Don Bachardy drawing from americanartists]
raw NYPD brutality, spawned by Kelly, Bloomberg and Quinn
stills captured from video on NYCindymedia site
On Thursday I wrote about a demonstration in which I had participated (put together by The Radical Homosexual Agenda [RHA], Assemble for Rights NYC, and other groups and individuals), which was directed against Council Speaker Quinn’s support of newly-adopted NYPD regulations restricting the right of assembly. I included in that entry a dozen or so still pictures I had taken.
They weren’t enough to tell me about the full measure and shape of the violence I witnessed that afternoon. Last night I saw this footage of the Glass Bead Collective and Time’s Up! Video Collective documenting the most violent images of Police aggression I’ve witnessed in almost twenty years of street activism.
Go to this NYC indymedia page and click onto the link under the heading, “Video Footage showing aggressive arrests by NYPD during the peacefull parade”. Note that the video is composed of segments from several cameras, so there is more than a single presentation of some scenes.
It was already clear to anyone who hasn’t tried to avoid thinking about the quality of civic life in New York that this city’s police ranks and leadership are both out of control and a physical and Constitutional threat to its citizens, and not just those seen by “the finest” as “the other”, so this footage should not come as a revelation to any of us. But the problem neither begins nor ends with the failures of the uniforms on the street. Our appointed and elected representatives and municipal executives, far from fulfilling their responsibility to police the police, continue to aid and abet their crimes and outrages. Officials are content with a ritual mourning of the dead and arranging photo opportunities with the survivors, visiting the homes and attending the funerals of their prey – while paying tens of millions of dollars of our public treasury in court awards to the growing number of victims of police and government brutality.
Chief of Police Kelly is dead wrong about his so-called “parade rules”, the Mayor Bloomberg knows it and the best I can say about the Speaker of the City Council on this issue (she is also my local representative) is that Chris Quinn appears to have a tin ear on First Amendment issues. Our rights and freedoms to speak and assemble are not subject to political negotiation, the convenience of our law enforcement officials (or their macho “control” neuroses), the swift traffic (and free street storage) of private automobiles, or our politicians’ ambitions for higher office.
For a long time I lulled myself into thinking I could continue to distinguish between what has been happening in the country at large and what is going down here in the land I call home, but today I realize I can only be thankful that New York doesn’t have a foreign policy and weapons of mass destruction.
[images from Glass Bead Collective and Time’s Up! Video Collective via NYCindymedia]
police “control” un-permitted parade protesting Quinn
I survived this afternoon’s “Parade Without a Permit” more or less unscathed, although I was pushed to the ground while photographing the police exercising their “control” of our right to free speech.
At the start of the parade in City Hall Park there were, by Norm Siegel‘s semi-official count, 54 demonstrators (plus a large contingent of members of the alternative media, and various support people and legal observers), making the assemblage an official “un-permitted parade” according to new NYPD rules, which allow only up to 49 people if no police permit has been granted.
At no time was there a crime in progress; we presented no threat to anyone. There was not even a hint of a misdemeanor, yet the Department, our servants, not content with a melodramatic presence made up of officers and inspectors, many in plainclothes, a scooter contingent and several police vans, decided to do some pushing around.
The pushing began with repeated orders, rude shouts in fact, to keep our feet on the sidewalk at all times, even when it was narrowed or blocked by subway entrances and construction sheds. In the end it appeared to be problems with the obstruction and tunnel darkness of a large shed on the west side of Church Street, complicated by the many bags of debris stacked underneath, which elevated the pushing to the physical level. The police seemed to be unhappy with the speed with which we were clearing the street for the important people who use cars.
I assume that any attempt to point out to the officers that their own combined body mass and the bulk of their own vehicles added up to a much bigger traffic obstruction than did the presence of our little band would have fallen on deaf ears.
One verbal exchange led to another, and then the pushing began (from them on us) without any further warning. Before I could get away from the center of the melee I found myself on the pavement. I snapped a few (not very interesting) pictures from that dramatic vantage point and when I scrambled back to my feet I saw that at least two people had been taken into the middle of the street where they were on the ground. Surrounded by their banners, flags and leaflets, they were handcuffed and carried away.
The struggle for New York City’s recognition of the First Amendment will certainly continue, but for tonight we have these beautiful battle ribbons:
related sites:
The Radical Homosexual Agenda
Assemble for Rights NYC
NYC indymedia
Transportation Alternatives
TIME’S UP!
Association of the Bar of the City of New York
Critical Mass
Five Borough Bicycle Club
Radical Homosexual Agenda [RHA] “un-permitted parade”
“keeping control” (wire and flesh, inside a holding pen during the 2004 RNC)
No, Chris, in America the police are not supposed to write the laws and “control” demonstrations.
Yesterday morning on the Brian Lehrer show NY City Council Speaker Christine Quinn responded to a question from the host about her support of new NYPD regulations on “parade permitting”. The regulations dramatically restrict the public’s Constitutional rights of speech and assembly.
The NYPD will now require a permit for any public gathering, or “parade”, of 50 people or more. Section 1A of the city ruling defines a parade as “any march, motorcade, caravan, promenade, foot, or bicycle race, or similar event of any kind, procession or race which consists of a recognizable group of 50 or more pedestrians, vehicles, bicycles, or other devices move by human power, or ridden or herded animals proceeding together upon any public street or roadway.”
On the Lehrer show Quinn stated emphatically that she believes the new regulations are “fair and appropriate” and “allow people to express their First Amendment rights”, but it is clear to anyone concerned with exercising these rights that the police get to decide how and when and with whom they may do it.
I was shocked to hear the Speaker’s concluding expression of support for our uniformed enforcers: She stated that the police must have the ability to “keep control of situations” [my emphasis].
I’ve known Quinn for many years and I have spoken and written highly of her in the past, and I expect to be able to do so in the future, but it is clear to me that on this extremely important issue Quinn is just wrong. She really has “turned her back on civil rights”, in the words of The Radical Homosexual Agenda [RHA], the organizers of a demonstration at City Hall tomorrow afternoon at 4 o’clock.
Of course this is not about queers alone; political activists and alternative transportation advocates have been impacted by NYC police attitudes in the most dramatic manner in recent years, but the issue belongs to everyone who wishes to breathe free. The Council Speaker is an out lesbian with a background of community oranization and a family history of activism who has participated in demonstrations herself; she should know better.
The demonstration is certain to include more than 50 people. Not surprisingly, there will be no permit.
Almost certainly the most important event in New York this week, the “Parade Without a Permit”, will take place at City Hall tomorrow, Thursday, at 4 pm.
[images from indymedia, by anonymous, and included in my September 3, 2004 entry]
Hunter Reynolds at Artists Space
Hunter Reynolds Patina du Prey’s Memorial Dress: 1993 to 2007 [detail of installation]
Spinning, spinning, spinning.
Hunter Reynolds‘s elegant installation, “Patina du Prey’s Memorial Dress: 1993 to 2007“, is currently installed in one of the galleries of Artists Space. The performer/artist/activist‘s elegant, couture, strapless ball gown hangs from a torso mannequin in the SoHo gallery, not-so-slowly spinning on its axis (as it did when so memorably inhabited in the past by its creator himself), accompanied by an ambient piece of music composed for and contributed to the installation by the contemporary composer Edmund Campion.
This is not just another cold tally of the epidemic, but rather a very human, a very personal collection of thousands of memorials, and a rich artistic gesture as well: The names on the dress were initially drawn from the list of names on the AIDS quilt as it existed in 1993, so it embodied the memories of friends and family members. Since then, wherever the dress has appeared the artist has invited visitors to write additional names, also of people lost to the disease and remembered by friends and family members, in an accompanying ledger book.
Is the supply of names running down? No. While the death rate for this epidemic may have slowed or declined in industrial nations during the last ten or fifteen years, at least within the population segments hit first and hit the hardest, the toll for the planet as a whole has skyrocketed. More significant to the specific groups which have seen his installation, when Reynolds’s project was begun in 1993 the friends or families of people with AIDS were far less likely to admit they were friends or families of people with AIDS; they were very unlikely to come forward with names to be added to a memorial of any kind. Reynolds confirmed to me on Friday that even in the American and European cities visited by the Memorial Dress, cities where life-sustaining HIV drugs are most generally available, the frequency of the ledger entries continues unchanged. It seems the survivors of a plague whose casualties themselves the world branded odious from the start are still coming out of the closet today.
What can be seen at the gallery this month is the second (1996) realization of Patina du Prey’s mangown. The first was the 1963 dress; the current version is constructed of a rich dark (faux-black?) silk fabric covering a fitted bodice and crinoline skirt printed in gold to include thousands of additional names added during the travels of the original. The artist hopes to create a third dress, which will incorporate the four to five thousand new names which have been added to the books in recent years.
This image is of a detail of one page from one of those books:
PANEL AND PARTY
On Tueday, April 10, between 6:30 and 8 pm at the Artists Space gallery on 38 Greene Street in SoHo, Visual Aids and Artists Space will co-host a panel discussion, “Diamonds and Pearls: Remembrances and Recent Thinking on the Memorial Dress”, with Hunter Reynolds, Lia Gangitano, Alexander Gray and Simon Watson, moderated by Benjamin Weil and Amy Sadao.
Following the panel, from 8 until 9, guests are invited to party with Patina du Prey; there will be food and drink. [suggested donation: $5-7].