Fight of the Century
Page 20
In 1993, members of the Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston (GLIB) sought to celebrate both their Irish heritage and queer identities by marching in the parade under an organizational banner. Their application to participate was denied despite no written criteria or procedures for admission established by the council. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts held that the exclusion of GLIB violated the commonwealth’s public accommodations law, which protects people from discrimination in public places, including discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
In a 9–0 decision, the US Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Supreme Judicial Court, holding that compelling the inclusion of GLIB in the parade violated the organizers’ First Amendment rights. In its amicus brief, the ACLU—while supporting the organizers’ First Amendment rights—urged the Supreme Court to remand the case to further develop the facts regarding state involvement, which it believed would alter the First Amendment calculus. The City of Boston had allowed the council to use the city’s official seal, provided printing services to the organization, and helped fund the parade. The Court, however, ducked the issue, finding that the issue of state action was not properly preserved. LGBT groups continued to be excluded from the parade until 2015.
Queer, Irish, Marching
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
In 1995 I was arrested, along with about ninety others, for marching with an LBGTQ contingent in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade in Manhattan.
The parade, which was first held in New York City 250 years ago, had, for some time, barred LBGTQ people from marching as a group with any kind of banner declaring our sexual orientation as well as our Irishness.
For years prior to 1995, LGBTQ groups marched anyway, replete with a banner. Former mayor David Dinkins marched with the LGBTQ faction in 1991, and he, along with the other marchers, was jeered at, spat upon, and doused with beer.
In 1995, however, in Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston (GLIB), the US Supreme Court unanimously declared it legal for the Irish Council to prohibit LGBTQ people from marching in the parade. The opinion, delivered by Justice David Souter, asserted that private citizens organizing a public demonstration can’t be compelled by the state to include groups that convey a message the organizers don’t wish to convey. Souter wrote, “One important manifestation of the principle of free speech is that one who chooses to speak may also decide what not to say.” Private organizers of a public event were, then, exercising their right to free speech by silencing whomever they chose to silence.
So, as of 1995, it became not merely a difference of opinion but actually illegal for LGBTQ people to march in a Saint Patrick’s Day parade if we weren’t wanted by the parade’s organizers.
What, then, could we do but join the 1995 parade anyway, with multiple banners?
Now that we were breaking the law, we were subject to arrest if we refused to disperse. About ninety of us refused to disperse. About ninety of us were arrested.
Full disclosure: My Irish surname notwithstanding, I’m queer but I’m not Irish. My paternal grandfather, third generation, took the name Cunningham because it seemed like a better bet for getting on in America than his actual name, Grig, which is Croatian and was once, surely, Grigoslav, or something like that.
I’m Croatian, not Irish, though I didn’t learn about that until my early twenties, when my father found some old letters among my grandfather’s personal effects.
America is, of course, full of people bearing invented names and, by implication, invented histories. I, with my own invented name and history, had never marched in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade before. But I believe that any living person is Irish enough to publicly face down discrimination no matter where, or who, it comes from.
Full disclosure number two: I’m a white gay man, I pass for straight on the streets, and I haven’t suffered anything remotely like what much of the world has in store for its queer citizens.
Which made it all the more surprising for me when, on that Saint Patrick’s Day in 1995, before the police took us away, I saw the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue crowded with people jeering at us, spitting on us, throwing eggs, and dowsing us with beer.
Some of them were children. Some were elderly.
I particularly remember a woman around eighty, eminently respectable looking, shouting, “Get out, fags.”
She was probably someone’s grandmother. She might, in theory if not in fact, have been the grandmother of one of the queer marchers. She could more easily have been the unknowing grandmother of a queer grandchild or two or three, who happened not to be marching in the parade.
I suspect it’s white and male of me to have been so shocked by the vehemence of the hatred. I hope you’ll forgive me for my naiveté, and for stating what will be, for many, the obvious: We were only marching, respectfully, as a group, with banners declaring ourselves to be among the LGBTQ Irish. We were not chanting or causing a disruption of any kind. Still, the jeers, and the eggs, and the beer kept flying.
Soon after we’d passed the woman who wanted fags to go away, we were arrested.
I should tell you a little about getting arrested for an act of civil disobedience, if it’s never happened to you.
If, for instance, you’re merely marching in a parade from which you’ve been legally banned, the police order you to disperse. Should you obey, that’s that. Should you refuse, however, you’re resisting arrest and are summarily arrested. You’re handcuffed, put into a police van, and taken to whatever jail is closest.
Like some other marchers that day, I’d already been arrested, with ACT UP, any number of times, for civil disobedience and resisting arrest. We of ACT UP, however, were usually causing considerable disruption.
We were invading, and closing down, the New York Stock Exchange. Or we had handcuffed ourselves together in a human chain around a New Jersey pharmaceutical company that was refusing to share the results of its research into a promising AIDS vaccine. Or we were walking, en masse, covered in fake blood, into a speech being given by George H. W. Bush at the Waldorf Astoria.
We caused disruptions like that because first Ronald Reagan and then George H. W. Bush essentially never mentioned the AIDS epidemic during their presidencies. We caused disruptions like that because the Centers for Disease Control refused either to fast-track approval of promising new AIDS drugs—the established protocol took at least two years—or to release incompletely tested AIDS drugs to people who were dying, people who understandably felt that any yet-to-be-revealed side effects would still be preferable to death.
We caused disruptions like that because hardly anyone not directly affected by the epidemic was doing anything at all. We caused disruptions like that because we couldn’t think of any other way to draw attention to the fact that hundreds of thousands of people were dying and no one in power seemed to notice, or care.
We didn’t want to get arrested. Hardly anyone wants to get arrested. It was simply the inevitable result of causing the kinds of disruptions that might attract at least a little bit of attention.
Getting arrested for civil disobedience, and for resisting arrest, is a process similar to what I imagine it must have been like to go to some government agency or other in the days of the Soviet Union, when people stood in line for six or seven hours just to get a document stamped.
Going to jail is, more than anything else, crushingly dull. It takes about six to seven hours, moving from holding cell to holding cell, getting fingerprinted, etc. Weeks later you appear in court, where the judge almost inevitably dismisses your case, with the understanding that you’ll be better behaved for the next six months.
The police at the parade were brusque but not brutal. We were, after all, queer activists whose primary quarrel was not with the police. We were, for the most part, cooperative, and they, for the most part, were distant and weary, people with a job to do. That said, it surely made a difference that the majority of us were white.
The hatred today is not like what it was that day in 1995, but the battle does continue, to no one’s surprise. In 1999, at the Bronx parade, where six marchers were arrested, Karin O’Connor, an organizer of the parade, said, “We’re celebrating a Catholic holy day. We’re marching for Saint Patrick, and people who march should be in line with what we’re celebrating, Irish pride and Irish Catholic pride.” A gay group, she added, does not fit in at a Catholic celebration.
One wonders where that leaves the people who are queer, Irish, and Catholic.
In 2017, in Boston, OutVets, a group of LGBTQ veterans, was barred from participating in the parade, although they had marched in previous years. That said, after some politicians announced that they wouldn’t join the parade if OutVets was banned, the organizers reversed their decision, and OutVets became the parade’s lead group.
In 2016, the New York City Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, Inc. officially allowed Lavender and Green, the Irish LGBTQ organization, to march in the New York City parade. In 2017, notoriously homophobic Vice President Mike Pence (of Irish descent) marched for several blocks with the Irish contingent in the Washington, DC, parade.
And Ireland, after all, was the second country to legalize gay marriage, in 2015. Leo Varadkar is now, in 2019, Ireland’s first gay prime minister.
I wonder how that old woman, if she’s still alive, would feel about all that.
Progress has been made. But only up to a point.
There are, at this writing, thirty-six cities and towns in the United States where Saint Patrick’s Day parades are held. It remains legal for any of them to bar LGBTQ people from marching. In 2018, in the New York borough of Staten Island, the local parade committee voted to ban LGBTQ groups. Staten Island Parade president Larry Cummings said, “Our parade is for Irish heritage and culture. It is not a political or sexual identification parade.”
I suspect a number of Irish people would be surprised to hear that their heritage and culture has nothing to do with politics or sexual identification. I mean, have you ever been to Ireland?
The beat goes on, as Sonny and Cher put it. History tells us that any people who are determined simply to exist will outlast those who’d rather they not exist.
Here’s to the next Saint Patrick’s Day parade, then. And the next, and the next.
RENO V. ACLU (1997) ASHCROFT V. ACLU (2004)
Reno v. ACLU and Ashcroft v. ACLU are quintessential First Amendment cases. The federal government deemed a given form of speech socially harmful and took steps to silo it away. In Reno, the Court ruled the Communications Decency Act’s definition of obscenity was too broad and imprecise, censoring an enormous swath of otherwise legal speech, and therefore fell afoul of the First Amendment. In Ashcroft, the Court struck down the Child Online Protection Act as overbroad and ill tailored to its purpose, and therefore also unconstitutional.
In both cases, the ACLU shouldered the burden of making uncomfortable arguments in order to protect free speech, adhered to its higher principles in fighting to protect a core American freedom from overzealous legislators.
“Because Girls Can Read as Well as Boys”
On Protecting the Children
NEIL GAIMAN
Two weeks before I was born, in October 1960, D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was put on trial for obscenity. It was a jury trial, and at the end of it, the book was found not to be obscene. I was born on the day the book, in its cheap paperback edition, went on sale (and sold out, all across the United Kingdom). Mervyn Griffith-Jones, the prosecutor, had asked the jury in his opening statement, “When you have read it through, would you approve of your young sons, young daughters—because girls can read as well as boys—reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” Normally, only the last sentence of this is quoted, making fun of the antiquated attitudes of lawyers who had failed to realize that the sixties were just about to happen, and sexual intercourse was, as Philip Larkin put it, about to begin: after all, wives in 1960 were allowed to choose their own reading material, and the servant classes were being replaced by labor-saving devices.
The question that hangs in the air, though, always, and that colors conversation of censorship is the first half of Griffith-Jones’s question: Would you approve of your young sons, or your young daughters, reading this book, seeing this image, being exposed to this idea?
As adults, one of our responsibilities is to protect children. Some of this protection takes the form of keeping children away from images, from ideas, from stories, from films that we do not feel they are ready for.
Not all adults agree on the boundaries of this protective sphere, and not all children are the same. And “children” is a slippery concept, defined differently in different places. Where does childhood end? Would you protect a six-year-old from the same ideas or images you would protect a seventeen-and-a-half-year-old from? And how do “community standards,” the nebulous but still legally real idea that different people in different places have different views on what is or isn’t acceptable, fit into all this?
We want to protect our children. But legal arguments, like the one made in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover case, presume something about children that is not actually true: they assume that children read and parse fiction that contains sex in the same way that adults do.
Children want to know things. They are curious. But they tend to explore within their comfort zone.
Children are good at exploring and pretty good at figuring out their comfort zones. On the whole, they would tend not to pick up horror fiction, or even go to Judy Blume to learn about sex, before they are ready. But when they are ready and curious, they explore. It’s how they make sense of the adult world waiting for them. And children will make mistakes in their exploration. They will go too far. I remember, bored, waiting for my mother, as a boy, and picking up the only reading material around, which turned out to be a well-documented, respectable, illustrated publication about murder methods in World War II concentration camps and on Nazi experiments on human subjects who were mostly, like me, Jewish. I had known we had lost many relatives: discovering how, and discovering how human beings could kill other human beings, became the stuff of my nightmares.
(Quick! Define children. At what age does childhood end? In 2007, a Florida appeals court upheld the successful prosecution of a sixteen-year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old boy as sex offenders, in this case as “child pornographers,” for taking a photograph of themselves naked and one of them “engaged in sexual activity” [something they were legally of age to do] because the girl had emailed the photos to the boy as keepsakes. Should they have been prosecuted? Should the prosecution have been upheld? And if they had wanted to search the Internet for information on how to have sex safely, or for birth control, or even for legal advice on whether it was safe to take naked photos of themselves with their phones, should this be forbidden or encouraged?)
I write for children. I write for small children. They like destruction and creepy things, they like small journeys into the dark that end safely. I write for older children, who like stories about families and about death and danger. I write for adults. In writing for adults, I always find myself writing, in whatever disguise, about sex and about death. Writing for children, I try and write about hope and the complexity of the world, about bravery and doing the right thing. But there is always death present in the stories. I leave out the sex, because younger children tend to respond to sex in their fiction in the way that children respond to a drunk adult throwing up in the street: there’s curiosity there, but also aversion, the knowledge that this is part of an adult world that is inevitably waiting for them but is f
illed with weird-ass things that adults inexplicably do. But several of my adult novels have been honored as adult books that older children would or should read, and they have sex in them, and darkness.
There will always be curiosity about the adult world. There will always be ways to explore that. (I was twelve or thirteen when William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist went around the school, passed from hand to hand, from boy to boy. The page with the crucifix masturbation, just like the pages in the unabridged class dictionary that contained the swear words, was the page the book fell open to.)
The Internet began as a place where government employees and academics could exchange information with each other. And then it grew, unplanned and, for the most part, unregulated. The Internet is a delivery system. It can deliver a Batman cartoon or a porn video. It can deliver tweets or blogs or adverts, money or movies or gardening tips. It can offer you all the world’s information, or most of it, entertainment and violence, delights and dangers of all kinds. Anything you can encounter in the world outside you can find a version of on the Internet. So the question becomes, How do you regulate something so huge, so slippery, so potentially filled with pitfalls? And how do we protect our children from everything in the world? Our six-year-olds as well as our seventeen-year-olds?
As a parent, I want to keep my children safe from all dangers and threats. (I put my hands over my twelve-year-old daughter’s eyes during Pan’s Labyrinth, during the bloody bits, and told her what the subtitles were saying. She didn’t want to stop watching, but she didn’t want or need the images of blood in her head. But it would have been a lesser film if Guillermo del Toro had been forced to take those moments out of his movie, eliding the adult content to protect the children.)