Millions celebrate gay pride worldwide

Around 300,000 people participated in Atlanta, Georgia’s gay pride festivities, June 29-30, 2002.
Photo by Brendan Conley

By Brendan Conley

July 1 (AGR)— From Asheville to Zagreb, millions of people throughout the world participated in gay pride celebrations over the June 29-30 weekend.  Lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgendered people, and their supporters marched in parades, celebrating their queerness and standing up for gay rights.  The events ranged from giant festivals that were embraced by the establishment to tense protest marches where participants endured attacks and harassment.

New York City hosted one of the world’s largest gay pride parades, with an estimated one million people participating, appropriate for the city that can call itself the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement.  Most gay pride events are held at the end of June to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, in which patrons of the Stonewall Inn led days of riots to protest a police raid of the Greenwich Village gay bar. Thirty-three years later, New York’s gay pride parade was led by the mayor, Michael Bloomberg. State legislators vowed to work toward the legalization of same-sex marriage.  The event began with a mass wedding in Central Park, with clergy of various faiths blessing the unions of more than 50 same-sex couples.  The march proceeded down Fifth Avenue to Greenwich Village.

In Toronto, more than 100 floats paraded through the city’s Gay Village as more than a million people braved scorching heat for the annual gay pride celebrations.  One participant was Marc Hall, a 17 year old who sued his school board for the right to bring his boyfriend to the prom.

In San Francisco, where more than a million people took part in the celebrations, Dykes on Bikes led a spirited parade through the Castro district.  The participants honored Jon Cook, who became the first openly gay police officer to die in the line of duty when he was killed in an automobile accident two weeks ago, chasing a domestic violence suspect.

Other celebrations took place in Chicago, Minneapolis, Paris, and Dublin.

The events in North America and Western Europe seemed to walk a fine line between celebration and protest.  Some activists decried the commercialization of gay pride.  In Atlanta, where 300,000 people took part, the corporate-sponsored events resembled other large cultural festivals, with corporations, local businesses, and politicians vying for attention.  While the Coors brewing company sponsored the festival, maintaining a monopoly on beer sold in Piedmont Park, activist groups ran full-page ads in a local newspaper urging a boycott of the company over its “anti-gay” policies.

In Asheville, North Carolina, anti-capitalist protesters joined with queer folk to march through the streets.  In Seattle, while gay police officers, firefighters, and politicians took part in the official gay pride celebrations, the Seattle Fruit Brigade held an “anti-corporate, pro-freak” alternative event.  In San Francisco last month, activists created a “Gay Shame” event to critique the commercialization of the mainstream gay pride movement.

On June 29, 2002, in Asheville, NC, over 80 people rallied in Pritchard Park and then paraded through downtown to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion.
Photo by Tamiko Murray

In other parts of the world, gay activists fought repression and harassment.

In Israel, tight security and the tension of war affected the festivities. Tel Aviv, which boasts the country’s largest gay community, hosted a parade of hundreds of lesbians and gays.  In Jerusalem, activists overcame a hostile local government and Orthodox Jewish protesters to declare “Love Without Borders” in the city’s first ever gay pride event.  Many gay Israelis linked their cause with the struggle against the occupation of the Palestinian territories.  “Free Condoms, Free Palestine” read one sign.

In Latin America, gay activists marched to demand equal rights.  Thousands marched through the streets of Mexico City, with the theme “For the right to be different, a society of coexistence.”  In Venezuela, where homosexuals are often fired from their jobs if their sexual orientation is discovered, an estimated 1,200 protesters marched through Caracas.  One of the biggest gay pride events in Latin America took place in Sao Paulo, Brazil earlier in June.  The march of about 400,000 people was led by the city’s mayor, the left-wing sexologist Marta Suplicy.

In Zagreb, Croatia, about 200 gays and lesbians marched through the center of the city, as riot cops held back hundreds of angry protesters.  At one point, a tear gas canister was tossed at the marchers, but no one was injured.

Thousands protest G8 in Calgary

Compiled by Sean Marquis

July 2— As Group of Eight (G8) leaders met in the Rocky Mountain resort of Kananaskis, Canada, thousands took to the streets of Calgary, June 25-27 to protest the meeting and G8 policies.

About 3,000 took part in street actions in Calgary, home to the head offices of several telecommunications companies and the seat of the Canadian oil industry.

Activists are angry that the G8 leaders are making key decisions on major issues like third-world development, the economy and trade without input from ordinary people.

The G8 includes Canada, Britain, the United States, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and Russia.

Surrealism rules G8 summit protests
On Tuesday, June 25, protesters stripped down to their slogans outside a GAP store in Calgary.

“I’d rather go naked than wear GAP,” chanted about forty protesters as they stripped off their clothes. Surrounded by hundreds of supporters, scores of media and curious Calgarians, the protesters said the GAP exploits poor workers, mostly women, in three hundred sweatshops in fifty-five countries in the global South.

The protesters say the GAP is a concrete example of how corporations use the free market policies promoted by the G8 to make money -- “at any cost.”

On Wednesday 4-5,000 took part in a snake march that managed to shut down business in the downtown core.  Traffic jammed and the streets and offices remained nearly deserted of workers all morning.  “Street soccer” games were played to tie up intersections, and activists staged an artistic event called the Die-in for Life.  It featured a memorial to Carlos Giulianni, a protester shot dead by police in Genoa, Italy during last year’s G8 summit. About 800 participants dropped down and pretended to die, while big black papier-machier crows flew over them.

At the Global Knit-in on Stephen Avenue, a crowd knit, crocheted and wove while singing songs. A statement from the Revolutionary Knitting Circle read: “We seek to revive and expand the social traditions around textiles and other hand-craft work…We promote small-scale, local production and trade. While our focus is on knitting, we welcome other forms of textile hand-craft such as quilting and crochet. Some of us feel that macrame is not a tool for social change.”

On June 27 dozens of activists evoked the spirit of Gaia, the Earth goddess, before stripping down, caking themselves with mud and setting off on a journey through downtown.

The mud people were joined by winged people and plant people, all singing, drumming and passing out seeds. “The G8 is operating on a power structure that no longer serves the people or serves the planet,” said Ocean Rose of a group called the Pagan Cluster, which organized the “mud-in.”

“What this has to do with the G8 is it’s symbolically and magically taking apart and helping the crumbling of the structures of power,” she said.

G8 ‘failed to deliver’ on Africa
On Thursday, four African leaders -- South African President Thabo Mbeki and his Algerian, Nigerian and Senegalese counterparts -- sought to persuade the G8 leaders to provide funding for their New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) plan.

What the G8 came up with, though, has been called a squandered opportunity.

African leaders invited to the G8 gathering in Kananaskis, Canada, expressed deep disappointment that the plan did nothing to open western markets, cancel debts of the poorest countries, or provide the financial aid needed to meet the United Nations’ (UN) targets for tackling global poverty by 2015.

The African leaders were hoping for $35 billion in aid and investment, what they got was $6 billion, even though the World Bank estimates between $40-60 billion a year is needed to get Africa on target to meet UN development and poverty alleviation goals.

Oxfam, a British humanitarian group, said the summit had “failed to deliver the much-hyped breakthrough for Africa. A year of promises and grand intentions came to nothing as the leaders of the industrialized world agreed to an action plan lacking two key elements -- action and a plan.”

The 50 Years Is Enough Network responded to the G8 Summit’s action plan on Africa by accusing world leaders of treating the chronic problems of Africa with increased doses of the same medicine that has already poisoned the continent.

“More privatization, more foreign ownership, less spending on social programs, deregulation of trade … has worked splendidly -- for the multinational corporations based in the G7 [not including Russia]countries, and for coffin-makers in Africa,” said Njoki Njoroge of the network.

Although NEPAD was created by African leaders, it is not supported by many African people.

In an interview with CBC national radio, Women for Change (WFC) executive director Emily Sikazwe said NEPAD was based on the same development and economic model crafted by the G8, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank that has been in place for the last 20 years, with catastrophic effects.

“Because Zambia is forced to service debts which the G8 insists we owe the World Bank and IMF, our government has no resources left to take care of its citizens,” Sikazwe said. “The World Bank and IMF behave like a very rich person who takes the bread out of the mouth of a very hungry child.” Sikazwe said Africa needed total debt cancellation.

“We don’t owe the G8 anything. Rather it is the G8 countries who are indebted to [Africa] as a result of the slave trade, colonization and now extraction of our mineral wealth,” she said.

According to a June 29 report by the Voice of America (VOA), sociologist Aminata Dramane Traore of the West African nation of Mali said she believes NEPAD will benefit only the African politicians who proposed it.

“The way they are acting serves their own political interests, so that they can have funds to invest in whatever they want. In terms of priorities, we think that the best thing Africa has to do right now is to invest in human beings. People are dying. The social reality [here] is just bad,” Traore said.

Sources: Alberta Indymedia, Guardian (UK), Greenpeace Canada, The Post (Lusaka), Reuters, Toronto Globe & Mail, VOAnews

Anti-capitalists ‘take’ Canada’s capital

Activists converge on the steps of Canada’s Capitol, in Ottawa, Ontario, on June 26-27, 2002. Photo by Kent Mettle

By Eamon Martin

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, June 28 (AGR)— Undeterred by near-relentless rainfall, thousands of revolutionary anti-capitalists marched through the streets of Canada’s capital city in solidarity demonstrations marked to coincide with the Group of Eight (G8) summit of Western industrial leaders taking place in the remote resort village of Kananaskis in Alberta. Two days of marches ended with demonstrators taking to the steps of the nation’s parliament where protesters rallied against capitalism, fascism, war, exploitation, imperialism, and George W. Bush.

With no liberal presence in sight, a sea of balaclavas, bandanas, ski masks and red and black flags of militant, soaking-wet protesters followed a serpentine path through Ottawa’s streets. As high-rise office dwellers gawked at the streets below them, the throngs of thousands chanted in the pouring rain, “One-two-three-four – we don’t want your facist war! Five-six-seven-eight – organize and smash the state!”

“We’re trying to defeat capitalism. Capitalism is responsible for most of the world’s problems,” explained Bill Lambain, 72, from Toronto and a member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty.

Protest organizers had put out a call to action to “Take the capital” on June 26 and 27. Included on their website was an address list of corporate headquarters and international embassies that the event planners figured would be helpful to the visiting protester in search of a good location to vent their frustrations. In response, police were stationed on most street corners. Some of those on the “Radical Tour” list closed operations for the days of action. An Ottawa McDonald’s restaurant shut down, temporarily covering its storefront from top to bottom in plywood. City school children were given a surprise holiday and The Eternal Flame national monument at the capitol was doused and covered.

“The goal is very clear – a political and economic disruption of those institutions and government offices that help perpetuate the agenda of the G8,” said organizer Jaggi Singh.

On Wednesday, around 3,500 demonstrators took the city’s streets, stopping traffic in a circuitous route through the capital’s financial and commercial district.

During the day, local activists, in a cry for public housing, broke into and occupied an abandoned house. The march paid a visit to the site along its side-winding path.

Behind a banner reading, “Sick of waiting? Occupy!” activist Dan Sawyer shouted from a second-floor balcony of the squatted house to the hundreds assembled below.

“It’s a crime that this house is empty while 15,000 families wait seven years to get social housing,” said Sawyer. “We’ve had enough. We’re taking over this house.”

While police looked over the scene powerlessly, a few masked participants smashed in the windows and popped the tires of a squad car across the street.

At 3:30pm, Ottawa Police Staff Sergeant Rick Levine talked to the squatters and announced that police would not go in to remove them. “It’s [the situation] not going to change as long as you keep it cool,” he said.

Not long after, the day’s main march culminated with rallying on the steps of Parliament Hill. Protest slogans were quickly spray-painted and written in chalk on much of the area’s walkways. Among the phrases freshly adorning The Eternal Flame was “Eternal Struggle.” A small number shed their clothing while a few others toked “victory” bowls of marijuana.

One hour later, a separate march descended on the US embassy where revelers protested against US imperialism and the Bush administration’s “terror war.” More than any other G8 leader, the US president was undeniably singled-out as a target of outrage. Protesters chanted “Feed Bush more pretzels!” and “Bush is a terrorist!” until their throats were audibly hoarse. And much to the delight of most present an effigy of Bush was set afire in front of the embassy.

The next day, marches continued in much of the same fashion but with an even greater contingent of around 5,000 people participating. Thursday’s march was organized under the banner “1000 Flags of Resistance -- No One Is Illegal.” The central theme was an anti-capitalist attack against the criminalization, subjugation, and exploitation of indigenous peoples worldwide by the industrial forces of the Western world. Moreover, the day’s events were to express solidarity with those who are struggling for their rights to self-determination, whether in the Philippines, Colombia, Palestine, or even the US and Canada.

Signs depicted slain Genoa, Italy G8 protester Carlo Giuliani beneath the caption “Killed By G8.”

A widely distributed statement explained: “Today, the leaders of the G8 states are meeting in Alberta, surrounded by scenic mountains, golf courses, and thousands of soldiers and police. These eight men are the executive board of global capitalism, and the directors of the so-called “War on Terrorism.”

“We are marching together today in clear opposition to the G8 and its agenda …Hypocritically, capitalist globalization makes it easier for rich people and their money to cross borders, while controlling and exploiting the poor. We call for open borders, and full rights for migrants and refugees worldwide.”

At the outset, police threatened to tow away the march’s sound van. But hundreds of protesters immediately swarmed the vehicle, preventing any such thing from happening.

The march proceeded with delayed stops at crucial intersections, the National Defense Building, the British High Commission, and the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration.

“Free Palestine!” thousands demanded in front of the Israeli embassy.

One Ottawa woman who wished to remain anonymous, “nearly 80”and a member of the Raging Grannies, described her group’s position: “We’re here because we’re older women and we’re concerned about a decent world being left for our grandchildren. The G8 and all the things they’re doing are fucking up the world.”

Despite weeks of alarm about “violent protests” and snide condemnation by local officials and media, the tenor of the protests were distinctly physically non-confrontational. Besides the damaged squad car, a smashed anti-abortion marquee, some small smatterings of impromptu graffiti, and a few paint balls thrown at a bank or two, property destruction was notably tame. Conversely, there were also few incidents of arrest or police provocation.

Last Autumn, John Baglow, Ottawa resident and regional leader of the Public Service Association of Contracted workers (PSAC), participated in demonstrations against the Group of 20 meetings held at the time. Taken aback by repressive police measures they saw then, Baglow and his wife helped organize a protest witness team. This year, Baglow and other witnesses were on call 24 hours in case the police might renege on their promise to not evict the squatters.

“Quite frankly, [police conduct last fall] was outrageous,” Baglow said. After a public outcry, “the police figured they really had something to learn. They were much better this time.”

This year, hundreds of riot police were present in Ottawa but kept out of sight in nearby parking lots and hotels.

“It’s been asked if we’re grateful for the police. Let’s have a reality check here,” offered Singh. “There are over a hundred groups who’ve endorsed this demonstration. Many of them are groups that represent Arab groups, Muslim groups, African groups – some groups that are generally targeted. These groups have been visited by the police. They’ve been told explicitly that ‘if you participate in a non-permitted demonstration, you could be arrested,’ or ‘you know, you might not want to be involved with these groups.’ That’s what’s happening in the background. So you ask if we’re grateful? No, we’re not grateful for those visits or that intimidation.”

Singh himself is no stranger to protest intimidation. During last year’s protests against the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas summit in Quebec City, the activist was suddenly abducted by undercover police while walking down a city street and then detained for weeks on bogus conspiracy charges that were ultimately thrown out.

Challenging numerous members of the press who attempted to bait the organizer into advocating violence, Singh spoke about the nature of this peace movement at a press conference earlier in the day: “What we’re talking about is community control over resources –those necessities that you need to live your life. When we talk about Africa and the G8 -- they’re promoting privatization schemes that make water and electricity beyond the ability of the average person in Soweto or other communities in South Africa to have access to those things.

“We’re talking about cooperative control over these resources, creating decentralized communities, a people-centered economy. This is not Utopia. This is reality. These are things that do occur in small steps all over the place and things that can occur. They’ve occurred historically and they can occur again. But to do so we need to denounce those systems that make that community control, that kind of mutual aid, that kind of community solidarity impossible, because instead you’re promoting profit. The leaders of the G8 are quite explicit about this. George Bush said that in order for the economy to prosper, corporations need to make more profits. That’s his vision. I don’t think that’s the vision shared by most people. Enron and WorldCom -- I don’t believe people think we need to promote that kind of greed. We promote another vision based on social justice.”