Maybe, like me, you’ve spent the last several days marching for your damned rights in more than one city, and your feet are a little tired. Maybe you don’t want to end up like the one guy at 18th and Castro last night at 11:30 pm, hours after everyone else had gone home, banging a drum, chanting, and striding around the intersection hoping to get one more march on. Maybe you’re wondering what comes after the demonstrations. Well, this is the part where the real work begins.

Two Local Community Forums coming up this week:

“Prop 8 and Race: What’s Next (a community forum)”

“How can we build better bridges between the LGBT community and communities of color?

How can LGBT people of all races work with straight folks to better communicate our relationships?

What can we do as individuals to further unity in our community?

Join us for a panel discussion and community forum on this pressing topic.

Panelists include: Supervisor Bevan Dufty, Rev. Amos Brown, Third Baptist Church, Andrea Shorter, and Marriage for All

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

SF LBGT Community Center, 2nd Floor,  1800 Market at Octavio

7:00 – 9:00 pm

(flyer distributed by Stop Aids Project) “

AND

“Marriage Equality Town Hall“:

“As people have taken to the streets in response to the passage of Prop 8, we must seize this opportunity to bring our community together. Let’s heal together and constructively examine the Prop 8 campaign and determine where we go from here at a grassroots level in order to advance our marriage equality movement within California and nationwide.

Just imagine if we can convert the frustration exhibited with the passage of Prop 8 into a positive force to build support for marriage equality in California and to press our national leaders and President Elect Obama to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act.

Event is free and sponsored by: Marriage Equality USA, ACLU of Northern California, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and the Bayard Rustin Coalition

Thursday, November 20th, 6:30 – 9:15 pm

Veteran’s War Memorial at 401 Van Ness Ave at McAllister St (near City Hall)”

Now that I’ve convinced the Manly Fireplug that it’s okay to go to bearish events even if we can’t quite call ourselves bears, you may just see us at Bearracuda tonight. Bring Your Own Milk.

From Daily Kos:

by PaulinSF (w/video link):

Sat Nov 15, 2008
“The group of a dozen or so young street preachers who have been making a habit of preaching the joys of salvation from a street corner in the heart of San Francisco’s Castro district for months had a rude shock last night.After having their right to marry stripped away from them by Prop 8, the Friday night crowd was in no mood to have bigotry preached to them from the middle of their own neighborhood.  A large crowd of Castro residents and visitors gathered to demand that the Christian group leave.  Every available police car in the district and some from outside of it were dispatched to deal with the resulting melee. It took a squad of 15 or 20 police officers with batons at the ready to escort the group of preachers several blocks to their cars, while the crowd dogged their heels every step of the way, chanting “Bigots out of our neighborhood” and “Don’t come back”.

Check out the video HERE (raw footage).  It is well worth the watch.”

An edited version with news commentary here.
Another article on the same event here.

The gays are pissed.  Kicking us when we’re down wasn’t the smartest decision these preachers made. Coming into our own neighborhood to do so was insane. Watching this video, it’s easy to wonder if we’re on the verge of another Stonewall.

Information on Join the Impact, a coordinated, nation-wide series of demonstrations, available here.

1. The Archdiocese of San Francisco contacted the Mormons last June and asked for their help in supporting Prop 8.  The Catholics and the Mormons managed to put aside their vast theological differences for the sole purpose of opposing us.

2. Their votes were informed by religious beliefs, which by their nature can’t be reasoned with – passionate beliefs that unite people to fight tirelessly for a cause they believe in; namely, defeating us at the polls.

3. Regardless of how you feel about the issue of gay marriage, and if it’s time has come, or if other issues should take precedent, or if we should even desire a broken-down institution like marriage, this fight is not really about gay marriage.  It’s about the fact that we are not recognized as full citizens by our own country, and by a large number of Americans and their organized religions. This issue is about whether or not gays get counted as human. Like the ban against gays in the military, it is a concrete example of institutional discrimination. We are the bottom of their barrel, we are their scapegoats, and marriage is simply the most current landscape for this battle, not the battle itself.

4. You may not want to get married, but you deserve to have the choice.

5. Regardless of how you feel about marriage, the fact is that for whatever reason, for a ton of reasons or for no apparent reason at all, THIS IS THE ISSUE that is now galvanizing thousands and thousands of people, both gay and straight, and we need to stop scolding from the sidelines and ride this passion as far as it will take us, right now, today, because passion cannot be manufactured, because it is organic and all-too-often temporary, and because this particular battle will affect countless other issues in ways that we cannot even imagine today, issues that you may feel more strongly about. This is a stepping stone, the next stone in our path. Take the step.

6. You will be participating in history, instead of merely observing it.

7. After four days of protests in California, Governor Schwarzenegger publicly encouraged us to keep fighting.

8. After five days of protests, forty-four members of the California legislature, more than one-third of our lawmakers, added their voices to the chorus calling on the state’s highest court to overturn Prop 8.

9. After five days of protests, Keith Olbermann added his own emotional voice to our fight.

10. Our anger is giving other people permission to join us, and after Saturday’s protests, others are bound to follow.

11. The fight over Prop 8 has already fallen off the front pages of most non-California newspapers and news sites. A coordinated, nation-wide demonstration will return that issue to the front pages.

12. The longer our anger lasts, the more people will ask themselves why we are so fucking angry. We want them to be asking themselves this question, every single day.

13. You will see, at these demonstrations, high school and college kids who don’t have any plans to get married any time soon but know what discrimination looks like when they see it.

14. Seeing them will give you hope for our future.

15. You are straight and you want to show your support in some concrete way.

16. You are not straight and the demonstrations will be filled with single dudes of every conceivable gender.

17. Gay weddings with free bars.

18. You spend too much time in front of your computer. Alone.

19. And instant messages don’t count.

20. Because we don’t have the shared religious beliefs to unite us against our opposition. Because the only passion that we have that could possibly counteract that unreasonable passion is our concern for each other.

My friend Kareem Fahmy, a very talented theater director, has a double billing of two new works playing for those of you in New York:

One Sixteenth, by Rachel Schwartz:

“The music of Beethoven, Chopin, and Back is interwoven with a remarkable new monologue about a woman crushed by her hopes and dreams. One Sixteenth is a funny, touching play about the genesis of genius, a life of unrealized ambition, and an unrequited love so acute that a heart begins to break.”

And Love Dr. Mueller,  adapted from the writings of Cookie Mueller:

“Writer, actress, mother, outlaw, fashion designer, go-go dancer, Dreamlander, witch-doctor… Cookie Mueller was a force of nature who blazed a trendsetting trail through the 60′s, 70′s, and 80′s, only to have her life cut short by AIDS. Love Dr Mueller is the first-ever play to tell Cookie’s amazing life story and is adapted directly from her writings.”

Check out the site for dates and times.

This coming Saturday, November 15th, there will be a coordinated series of demonstrations all across the country against the passage of Prop 8. If you only go to one demonstration, THIS IS THE ONE. Right now their website is down because they are getting so much more traffic than anticipated, but keep checking back.  As of this moment there are demonstrations planned in every single state, many states with more than one location, taking place at 1:30 pm East Coast/10:30 am West Coast time.  I’ll write more about WHY you should attend this demonstration later on, maybe after I’ve had more than a half cup of coffee.  Until then, trust me, this will be worth attending:

Join the Impact

This site also has a listing of demonstrations taking place around California and across the country.

So I had some reservations about attending the No on 8 demonstration here in SF the other night. I mean, marching from downtown through the Castro, to Dolores Park, is sort of like preaching to the converted. But it was fucking amazing to be a part of that enormous crowd. Especially cool to see so many young ones, high school and college aged, our future marching alongside us.  And whether or not we reached anyone outside of our little demographic, I know it pumped some fuel through me to carry the fight further and farther.

At one point everyone around me started shouting, “What do we want? JUSTICE!! When do we want it? NOW!!”

Except I thought they were shouting, “What do we want? CHRISTMAS!! When do we want it? NOW!!”

That’s a chant I could get behind.

For about twelve hours the other day I was struck with this peaceful vision of gay people sitting down to a discussion with leaders of the communities who voted Yes on 8. To clear up some false assumptions (i.e. we all “choose” to be gay) while sharing some real consequences of the discrimination we face.  In other words, avoiding the temptation of pure anger and revenge, and meet them as close to half-way as possible.  Not to say that acts of revenge, i.e. boycotting Utah, can’t also have the intended effect.  But, I was thinking, it’s not the only way there.

But eventually that vision began to feel more and more like the pipe dream of an optimistic fourteen-year-old. The common thread tying most of the those communities together (Mormons, Catholics, Fundamentalists, Latinos, African Americans) is, with a couple of exceptions, organized religion.  They may not follow the same leaders, but they’re voting based on their faith and beliefs.  There’s really no reasoning with religion. I read about one local woman in a decent article at SF Gate:

Kathy in Pleasanton has a story about a kindly gay uncle whose longtime partner nursed him through a nasty bout with cancer. However, even after that, she would never support her uncle’s marriage. What she really hopes, she says, is that “you will reconsider your feelings toward those of us who support Proposition 8.”

Sounds like the “kindly” gene skipped Kathy’s generation. If that kind of personal relationship can’t change her mind, then there isn’t much hope.  We’re going to have to concentrate more on winning our rights through the legal system, instead of relying upon the whims  of a simple majority of our fellows, who obviously can’t be trusted with the power that California currently gives them.

The Fireplug and I are driving up to the protest at our state’s capitol today. This site has a list of all of the scheduled upcoming protests, including a few in other states.  This site gives information about Join the Impact, a movement to organize rallies at the city halls all across the country on November 15th.

So here are the top three phrases that people typed into Google yesterday that brought them to my site:

1. dogpoet.com

2. dogpoet

3. why hairy chests

Anyone care to answer?

I forgot to mention that after the election results, after the Prop 8 results, I came home and had violent, hot, man-on-man sex with the Manly Fireplug, my fiancé.  Or, as he likes to call me, “My Beyoncé.”  Next up: “Dogpoet and Fireplug Make a Porno and Hack Into the Mormon Website.”