Liminal states

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1. jon | 14-Nov-08 at 9:04 am | Permalink

   Andy’s Mega Prop 8 Update 11-13-08: News, Protests, Links, Video on Towleroad has a lot more info on what’s happening. His report on last night’s New York City protest is great too, as is Joe.My.God’s

   Jasmine Beach-Ferrara’s Why We Lost in California: An Analysis of “No on 8” Field Strategies on The Democratic Strategist is a well-done strategic analysis of the Prop 8 campaign. What’s especially interesting is that the self-organized Just Say No protests respond to all five of her recommendations: it’s value-based, national (international even), rapid (a week from idea to execution!), exhibits best practices and a culture of innovation, and is attempting new forms of engagement with opponents of same-sex marriage.

2. jon | 14-Nov-08 at 6:44 pm | Permalink

   Rex Wockner’s Stonewall 2.0? Gay Activism 4.0? from Tuesday has it nailed:

   Maybe Stonewall was Activism 1.0, ACT UP was Activism 2.0, the failed corporate activism of HRC and No On Prop 8 was Activism 3.0, and now we are witnessing Activism 4.0 being born.

   It’s virtually impossible to know you’re experiencing history in the making when you’re right in the middle of it. But our present generation with their SMS texting and their Twittering (aka “tweeting”) and their Facebooking are mad as hell over this, and it’s lookin’ to me like they’re not going to take it anymore.

   I sense the power could be shifting, from the suit-and-tie professional activists with their offices, their access, their press releases and their catered receptions, to the grassroots. And come to think of it, what was Obama’s victory but the victory of the grassroots?

   Former ACT UP spokesman Peter Staley’s My First Facebook Demo on poz.com strikes a similar chord, while making some good points about possibilities for improvement on last night’s demo:

   Last night’s Prop 8 demo in New York City was inspiring on many levels. The turn-out was huge. The fact that it all happened virally online, starting with a single Facebook event posted only three days earlier by a 26-year-old (great work, Corey Johnson!), amazes me. And what happened last night is part of something huge – the reawakening of our national gay rights movement. As Rex Wockner said, this is Stonewall 2.0….

   [I]t was a very happy but low energy event by ACT UP standards. The chants died quickly, probably because half the crowd was busy talking or texting on their cell phones (“where r u? i’m sort of in the middle. where?”).

   But I couldn’t argue with the turn-out. It matched ACT UP’s biggest demos. And the diversity of the crowd was wonderful. It was obvious that many of the twenty-somethings (and younger) were demonstrating for the first time. They seemed thrilled by it.

   And that’s what matters most.

   And Paul in SF’s Is the Prop 8 Protest Stonewall 2.0? on Pam’s House Blend makes a similar point:

   We quite rightly credit the Stonewall Riots as being the catalyst for the surge of queer political energy that blew “The love that dare not speak its name” out of its closet and into the streets, the living rooms, the workplaces and the political halls of America.

   The story of that bar full of queers standing up and fighting for their right to be treated as full citizens galvanized GLBT people, especially the young, across the land. Inspired, these young folks organized themselves into a fluid movement with no hierarchy and a simple mission; to fight discrimination against GLBT folks wherever it was found….

   We owe the Mormon and the Catholic churches a word of thanks. They just spent millions of dollars making activists out of our complacent, distracted community. Really, thanks. Welcome to Stonewall 2.0.

   donal adds in a comment:

   This round of actions changes everything…
   They make it possible to create what we’ve needed all along, a GLBT left independent of the LCR Republicans and the Barney Frank Democrats.

   I’m so happy I could cry 🙂

3. jon | 14-Nov-08 at 6:48 pm | Permalink

   Jessica Garrison in the LA Times:

   Leaders of the campaign against Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California, raised nearly $40 million and ran a careful, disciplined campaign with messages tested by focus groups and with only a few people authorized to speak to the media.

   They lost.

   n the week since, California has seen an outpouring of demonstrations ranging from quiet vigils to noisy street protests against Proposition 8, including rallies outside churches and the Mormon temple in Westwood as well as boycotts of some businesses that contributed to the Yes on 8 campaign.

   Many of those activities have been organized not by political professionals and established leaders in the gay community, but by young activists working independently on Facebook and MySpace.

   The grass-roots activism is a tribute to political organizing in the digital age, in which it is possible to mobilize thousands of people with a few clicks of a mouse. It has generated national attention — and set up a series of Saturday demonstrations that organizers hope will attract tens of thousands of people to city halls throughout California.

4. jon | 14-Nov-08 at 7:08 pm | Permalink

   And Justin Krebs, on OpenLeft, talks about Another 50-state strategy:

   In fact, Join The Impact, an online coalition that rose from the ashes of Prop 8 to fight for LGBT rights, is boasting of a coordinated day of protest tomorrow with cities in all 50 states. (It took Living Liberally 5 years to reach every state in the Union – it took Join The Impact two weeks, which strongly speaks both to the energy out there on this issue and their effectiveness as online organizers.)

   The netroots have long argued that progressive politics, including its activist component, shouldn’t be reserved for the coasts and DC, but instead recognized for something that happens everywhere, every day, in acts both big and small.

   Props to OpenLeft … while I often give them a hard time, they appear to be the first major progressive blogs to discuss the importance of these protests on the front page.

   Elsewhere the pattern I talked about yesterday of ignoring Join the Impact largely continues. More here.

   At least my Oxdown Gazette cross-post did make it to the recommended list, so at least the one-line title showed up on FDL’s front page this morning. Yay me!

   Update, September 16: Paul Rosenberg also posted on OpenLeft, Saturday morning. And I don’t mean to give the impression that the broader progressive blogosphere was ignoring Join the Impact. For example, Michael Jones at Change.org‘s Gay Rights blog mentioned it early Monday morning and has continued to highlight it, and in the other thread I talked about how just as with the Twitter Vote Report, “state blogs” are all over it. And now of course it’s getting attention, with front-page posts by SusanG on dKos, Josh on TPM, Todd Beeton on myDD, and so on. Still, there’s a lot to learn from the astonishing failure by the big progressive blogs to pay attention to the biggest civil rights protest since I’m-not-sure-when until after it had happened.

5. jon | 14-Nov-08 at 8:20 pm | Permalink

   Claire Cain Miller’s Gay-Rights Activists Use Web to Organize Global Rally in the New York Times’ BIts blog:

   “This is the potential of the Web,” said Ben Elowitz, chief executive of Wetpaint, a company that builds Web sites for individuals and companies and built one for Join the Impact….

   Amy Balliett, one of the two original organizers of the movement, has organized local demonstrations and fundraisers in the past the old-fashioned way, with fliers around town and word of mouth. She said she is astonished at the momentum and speed that Join the Impact has picked up from the Web.

   She contrasted it with the Stonewall Riot of 1969, which was a turning point in the campaign for gay rights. “Had they had social media, had they had the Internet, we would have been able to accomplish a lot more already, because they would have been able to keep the message alive and keep the community going,” she said.

   Indeed.

6. jon | 16-Nov-08 at 10:38 am | Permalink

   wow.

   Deborah and I went to the Seattle protest — 6,000 to 10,000 people, according to different reports. Volunteer Park was packed; event organizer Kyler did a great job of MCing and spoke wonderfully about his own experiences, King County Executive Ron Sims gave a barnburner of a speech, the mayor and state legislators spoke … and then we marched down Broadway and Pine St. to Westlake Center. Knowing that this was happening all around the country, it didn’t just feel like a movement. It felt like a tipping point.

   There’s a ton of press, of course, and amazing roundups everywhere — on Pam’s House Blend (with a great Flickr album, slideshow below) and Teddy Partridge’s on Firedoglake are two good places to start. Seattle alternative paper The Stranger‘s blog The Slog, Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish, and Calitics all have multiple posts and photos from different protests. Join the Imact has a Flickr group as well, and the wiki has a photo gallery as well as attendance estimates from across the country.

   On The Bilerico Project, Michael Crawford commented : “The crowd was on of the most diverse that I have seen for a LGBT gathering in DC with gay and straight, young and old, Black, white, Latino and Asian, human and puppy.” A lot of other reports commented on this same phenomenon in other cities — along with the huge number of allies (probably 50% of the Seattle crowd) and of course younger people. Yay for social network activism.

   Here’s Amy’s summary, from her THANK YOU post on Join the Impact‘s blog:

   Last week, some felt angry. Last week, some felt defeated. Last week, some felt hopeless.

   Today we have shown the world that we will not be victims anymore! Today, our community has risen and shown our opponents that we are MUCH MORE THAN 1 MILLION STRONG!

   And what next? Amy’s already covered this, in What happens next: more national actions including “Day without a Gay” on December 10, a national protest focused on DOMA on January 10, and person-to-person conversations:

   Join us in a challenge over the next 10 months that will make an IMPACT. 10 months – 10 lives changed. Everyone in this movement must help keep the conversation going. We are asking each and every one of you to engage in 10 conversations with someone who does not understand our struggle and help them to see our point of view. We are not asking that you try to infringe on or disrespect their beliefs. Change can not occur with insult, it will only occur with respect. If all of us work hard to positively affect 10 lives, we can change this entire nation!

   Well said.

   Here’s the photostream from Pam’s House Blend flickr group:

7. jon | 19-Nov-08 at 9:53 pm | Permalink

   Nancy Scola’s Is Join the Impact Bridging the Gay-Straight Gap? and Tom Watson’s Post-Obama Organizing? It’s Already in the Streets, both on techPresident, are excellent reading. Nancy sees things much as I do:

   It can take a lot to amaze those of us who study the web’s impact on on the world, but the speech and reach of the organizing against California’s Proposition 8, passed on the same day Barack Obama was elected president, has been simply astonishing.

   and after highlighting prespectives local protest organizers Tom Greene (Raleigh), Brandi Fitzgerald (Philadelphia), Derek Stephens (Columbus), and Becky Grove (Bend), all of whom managed to build diverse coalitions, ends on an encouraging note:

   It remains to be seen whether Join the Impact Internet-powered organizing can win over hearts and minds in the days ahead. But one thing is for certain. Some are already believers in the movement’s power.

   Philadelphia’s Fitzgerald says that she’d she’d never organized politically before a week or so ago. And today, she’s scheduled to turn in paperwork to start a local chapter of the national group Marriage Equality USA. Says Fitzgerald, “I have cried every day over the sheer power this has had.”

   Kos’ Taking on the System and the Prop 8 protests looks at things in the context of his book Taking on the System: individual empowerment in the face of “gatekeepers” who are out of touch. He quotes and links to Andrew Sullivan’s How relevant is the HRC? from The Daily Dish and Paul Hogarth’s BeyondChron post Why the Prop 8 protests matter, and adds:

   These nationwide protests are a watershed moment of sorts — the moment when the gay* community realized that it had the power to fight for change on its own, and didn’t require any of it’s so-called, self-appointed “leaders” to give them permission to engage. This isn’t the first time a community has made that realization (and TOS is full of such examples), but it never fails to inspire me….

   In this case, these protests have served as a wakeup call to equality-minded people all over the country. It is an empowering act. But rather than people feeling they’ve done their part by marching for a few hours, I’m willing to bet that, just like here in California, the seeds were planted for further organizing all over the country. There is nothing more dangerous for the status quo (the “system”) than people suddenly feeling empowered.

   Amazingly enough, though, Kos neither mentions nor links to Join the Impact or anybody involved. Paul’s article, which was front-paged on myDD, similarly avoids any mention of or link to Join the Impact. What’s with that?

   * sic. Join the Impact’s about us page and wiki very explicitly identify as LGBTQ. Presumably Kos isn’t intentionally marginalizing lesbians, bis, transgendered people, and queers but it’s still disappointing.

8. jon | 27-Dec-08 at 2:45 pm | Permalink

   A lot’s happened in the last five weeks. Rex Wockner’s Stonewall 2.0, Service Pack 1 gives the view from late November, looking forward to a string of events. Jesse McKinley’s Gay Marriage Ban Inspires New Wave of Activists New York Times article gave “official” recognition to the Stonewall 2.0 movement on December 9. Logo got on board and December 20th Light up the Night met its goals despite horrible weather nation-wide. All of which seems very successful to me.

   Of course in the middle of this came the Yes on 8-ers “forced divorce” lawsuit, the whole Rick Warren thing, and a gang-rape hate crime rubbed salt in still-open wounds and once again spotlighted how little influence LGBTQ and feminist communities are seen as having in the US of 2009. So the broader context, hmm, not so positive.

   I think this overall tone colors Peter Staley’s Join the (Diminishing) Impact and Dan Savage’s Diminishing Impact in The Stranger’s The Slog. Both have sensible advice for JTI — keep the momentum up, learn from past actions, encourage local actions as well as the coordinated national ones — but starting from the headlines they minimize the strength and trajectory of JTI and by extension the whole Stonewall 2.0 movement. Savage for example helpfully excerpts and highlights Staley’s descriptions of the three recent actions as having “failed to live up to this group’s early promise” and critiques the lack of measurable objectives without bothering to mention that Light up the Night had goals and met them. What’s with that?

9. Liminal states » Push to repeal DOMA: ways to take action now | 10-Jan-09 at 2:26 pm | Permalink

   […] The vibe under the sunshine at the corner of Castro and Market was positive and determined — a few hundred people maybe (I’m horrible at estimating), just the right size for the location.  The immediate purpose was to organize for signature-gathering for the Open Letter to President Obama, with people fanning out afterwards to BART stops, busy street-corners, the Gaza protest … in the broader context, it’s another building block in the “Stonewall 2.0″ wave of activism catalyzed by groups like Join the Impact and Courage Campaign that I’ve blogged about in Petitions are soooooo 20th century and Taking social network activism (and LGBTQ rights) to the next level. […]

10. jon | 12-Jan-09 at 2:48 am | Permalink

    Pam Spaulding’s Stonewall 2.0 — sizzle or fizzle on Pam’s House Blend links off to Michaelangelo Signorile’s discussion with Dan Savage on the topic. In a comment, I talked about my optimism, including

    Don’t get me wrong, I also think there’s plenty of room for improvement, and a lot to be learned from what has and hasn’t worked so far. Still, connections are continuing to deepen (Courage Campaign’s involvement is very significant); and even more importantly, local organizers are stepping forward and local networks are building. On the whole I see things on a path to a solid, sustainable, decentralized infrastructure — with a long way to go, admittedly, but still. It’s only two months from the first post-election organizing. The negativity seems remarkably premature.

    On Mike’s thread, I added

    Specifically with JTI, one of the key things that’s happening is a geographical decentering of influence away from SF, NY, and DC … this is incredibly important to the movement as a whole, but difficult to see when you’re in the middle of it.

11. Liminal states » #digg it!: initial experimental results — and let’s try it again! | 09-Feb-09 at 10:27 am | Permalink

    […] See Join the Impact: taking social network activism (and LGBTQ rights) to the next level why I’m not surprised that it was the LGBTQ-related post that got the best results right out […]

12. jon | 26-Apr-09 at 7:20 am | Permalink

    Queerty’s The Gay Revolution Will Be Twittered is a valuable overview of the LGBTQ presence on another social network site — especially interesting in light of the heavy LGBTQ involvement in #amazonfail.

13. #p2 and prioritizing diversity: background reading for Thursday’s tweeting « Liminal states | 29-Apr-09 at 7:36 am | Permalink

    […] follows on the heels of progressives’ obliviousness to Join the Impact. Last November, as JTI got over 150,000 people in the streets in ten days for marriage equality (another cause progressives support), there was virtually no coverage in the “progressive […]

14. Ten Years Later: Get FISA Right and the Future of Civil Liberties Activism | Get FISA Right | 04-Jul-18 at 9:45 am | Permalink

    […] place for activism since the glory days of Get FISA Right, Un Millón de Voces contra las FARC, and Join the Impact in […]