Source: Industry Standard, Bay Area Reporter
Mostly using web-based social networks, a new movement started this month after passage of Proposition 8 in California and similar anti-equality measure in Florida and Arizona.
Local protests were quickly organized throughout California and continued for more than a week after the Nov. 5 vote.
But it was the massive, coordinated series of protests throughout the country on November 15 that seems to have created a new mobilizing force for LGBT equality.
Although several local LGBT advocacy groups encouraged people on their mailing lists to join local protests, most of the rallies were organized without much input from the traditional groups.
The energy generated for and by those rallies could well simply dissipate, but it could also either prompt change in the established groups that have in the past pressed for LGBT legislation, or lead to new groups.
But longtime gay rights activist Cleve Jones, a friend of slain gay Supervisor Harvey Milk, discouraged the formation of new groups.
"The last thing we need right now are more big, cumbersome organizations with big budgets," Jones told the Bay Area Reporter. "We need people in the streets."
Using tools offered by a Seattle-based Internet startup, wetpaint.com, Amy Balliett of Seattle set up a website designed to help people organize local protests of the anti-gay votes.
She called the site JoinTheImpact.com.
In slightly more than a week, her webpage and associated groups on Facebook had managed to rally hundreds of thousands to turn out on November 15 for protests in cities large and small.
And it didn't go away after the November 15.
JoinTheImpact.com is now encouraging those inspired by the Nov. 15 rallies to join it in three actions.
- Starting today, the website encourages a "LGBTQ Food Drive for Equality".
"Beginning on November 28th, 2008 and going until we Light Up the Night for Equal Rights on December 20th, JoinTheImpact is launching the first national LGBTQ Food Drive for Equality! Through this event, we will work to reach out not only to those who have worked alongside us, but to organizations and individuals that fear us and oppose our cause." - on Dec 10, JoinTheImpact, encourages LGBT people to participate in a strike and boycott called "Day Without a Gay". "During the largest shopping season of the year, we ask that you do one very important thing: Don't Buy Anything! What would happen to this world if the LGBTQ community didn't exist?"
- on Dec. 20, candlelight vigils will be scheduled under the title "Light Up the Night". The vigils will be held at commercial centers throughout the county "in remembrance of the rights that once were for 18,000 marriages, and in honor of the rights that one day will be again - for EVERYONE."
The Industry Standard, a technology business magazine, did a three-part online series by reporter Cyndy Aleo-Carreira on the use of web tools by Balliett and fellow organizers of the protests that followed the Prop. 8 vote.
A woman who attended a rally in San Diego along with a group of like-minded associates from the North County suburbs told Aleo-Carreira that she's convinced web tools made that rally possible.
"I don't think it could have been done without jointheimpact.com. [It gave us] one central location to find out what was going on and when it was happening in each city," Lindsey Padgett Brown told Aleo-Carreira. "Then, [you could] Email your friends and decide how to arrange it. Without the Internet, probably nothing of this magnitude could have happened so quickly."
A Connecticut resident, Robyn Greenspan, was visiting New Orleans on Nov. 15. She told the Industry Standard reporter that she first heard about the protests on Twitter and used Google maps to figure out that the New Orleans protest would be close to her hotel.
"It is mind-boggling to think that this was organized on a national level in about 10 days and this certainly wouldn't have happened had we relied on traditional media or 'old school' networks," Greenspan said. "Events like these--organized electronically and spread virally--and the success of Obama's social networking reach has heralded a new era and a demographic shift in how information is disseminated and used as an influence."
Despite the success of online organizing for the rallies, Aleo-Carreira and others note there may be problems when organizing for the more mundane tasks associated with a political campaign.
Aleo-Carreira concludes:
There are several questions that remain. The first is whether this type of online-centric organization by the Join the Impact group could have changed the outcome of the ballot measures had it been launched before November 4. Second, it's hard to determine whether online tools are more effective than traditional methods of building support for a political issue. After all, supporters of Proposition 8 mobilized millions of voters using traditional methods, and won. These included television spots, print ads, and pamphlets. While these tactics are costly and take longer to build a groundswell of support, they also reach demographic groups who may not use Web tools to get information about political issues.
It's also not clear yet how the online organizing will interact with traditional gay rights lobbying and advocacy groups.
It's clear that the traditional groups tried to benefit from the energy generated by the rallies. National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, which appeared to expend little effort to defeat Prop. 8 in California, nonetheless sent representatives to speak at several of the national rallies, according to news reports.
In Seattle, Washington's largest and richest LGBT lobbying and advocacy group, Equal Right Washington, hired Kyler Powell, who organized the successful local rally. He will become "Event Consultant" for the group's annual rally at the state capitol in Olympia, according to an email from the group.
The same group is asking donors to dedicate at least $8 a month using the banner "Mad about 8? Donate $8".
But many in California have questioned the pre-vote actions of the professional managers of California's largest advocacy groups. Equality California's Geoff Kors vacationed in Spain for more than two weeks in the summer. Co-leader of the No-on-8 campaign Lorri Jean of LA Center spent a month in Alaska during the summer run up to the important election.
The vacations are part of a pattern of what some activists are now calling an inept campaign by those who have run the state's largest and best-funded LGBT groups.
Like others, Molly McKay, media director for Marriage Equality USA, has been critical of the No on 8 campaign's top-down approach to organizing, according to Bay Area Reporter.
She helped to organize what she thought would be a relatively small town hall to discuss the Prop. 8 campaign last week. But the event had to be postponed after the event drew more interest than organizers had anticipated, BAR reports.
McKay told the paper that she wants to help document specific experiences people have had around Prop 8 that will help show "the movable middle" the damage the measure's passage has caused.
McKay recalled for BAR's reporter the 9-year-old son of a lesbian couple who asked, "Does this mean they're going to come take me away from you?"
McKay is excited to see the generation of 20-somethings who've stepped up as leaders, and said coordination is important, however, "we want to be able to collaborate together, but not necessarily get into group-think mode."
"I think we want to create a structure so that it's more of a web than a skyscraper model," McKay told BAR.
Despite criticism of him and his group, Kors, who is executive director of Equality California and was a member of the No on 8 executive committee, told Bay Area Reporter, "It's great to see how many people are getting involved at such a major level."
"I think it's an opportunity to grow the number of people who are involved and add additional leadership to the fight," Kors said. "The more people working on this, the better. If we need to go back to the ballot, we're going to need everyone."
Political analyst David Latterman, president of Fall Line Analytics in San Francisco, told Bay Area Reporter that a lot of what's happening right now is "quite good," but some group will need to coordinate the fundraising, lobbying, and political outreach that needs to be done.
"At some point, somebody needs to be the boss," said Latterman. As with most social issues, there needs to be a "people's movement, but you need to manage that process," he said.
Asked if EQCA, one of the lead groups in the No on 8 campaign coalition, should be in charge, Latterman said, "If they learn their lessons, sure, why not? Who else could do it? What other groups are out there?"
Traditional LGBT groups like EQCA appear to be trying to capture at least some of the energy unleashed after the Prop. 8 and by the Nov. 15 rallies, but the best hope for the future may come from those who maintain a separation from the traditional groups.
Several of the new online activists appear to prefer to either form new groups, or to retain the informal nature of web-based social groups.
Tina Reynolds and her mostly LGBT staff at a small San Francisco company held a staff meeting after Prop 8 passed to figure out what they could do about it.
At a staff meeting, they came up with a mission statement, launched a Web site, and started developing T-shirts, stickers, and other materials to support the work of their brand new group, the Sacramento-based Equality Action Now.
Saturday, they helped put on a rally in Sacramento that drew an estimated 5,000 people.
Cleve Jones and Dustin Lance Black, the screenwriter for the Milk movie which opened in several cities this week, recently wrote a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle in which they called on equality supporters to "sustain and intensify the nationwide campaign of mass protests and nonviolent civil disobedience" for seven weeks, starting Thursday, November 27, the 30th anniversary of Milk's assassination, according to Bay Area Reporter.
Jones and Black then want people to gather en masse in Washington, D.C., on the morning of Tuesday, January 20, to honor the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama.
"The strategy we've been following for the last 30 years to fight city by city, county by county, and state by state has failed," Jones said, leaving a patchwork of inequality where rights guaranteed in one place aren't necessarily guaranteed in others.
Jones thinks it's time for the kind of federal intervention performed when Congress and President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made racial segregation in schools, public places, and employment illegal.
"I'm tired of waiting," said Jones, according to BAR. "It's been 30 years since Harvey was killed, and I'm not willing to wait another 30 years."
Source: Join the Impact and the Web, part III: Putting out the call | Industry Standard
Prop 8 opponents plot next moves | Bay Area Reporter