elfs | Saturday afternoon: The No on 8 Rally in Seattle. (Reply)

Rally at Westlake Center

Omaha and I went to the No On 8 Rally this weekend. We were pressed for time with all the other stuff going on Saturday, but we were determined to make it to the main rally at Westlake Center and join in the chorus of voices. I know a lot of straight people who wonder why this is happening now, since the election is over. I've even heard "You lost, get over it." What those people don't understand, and need to understand, is that the closet is a real thing still. Being queer isn't like being a different color. You can go your whole life without coming out to co-workers or family. You don't really believe the threats will reach you because your queerness is invisible. It's not until you've actually been bashed that you react. Well, Proposition 8 in California is a bashing of biblical proportions, and the reaction is commensurate to the damage done.

Someone thinks he's cute.

The rally was pretty big, as these things go. There were lots of cute women there, not all of them obviously queer, and not a few hot men, including one quad of very good looking bears right in front of me who were snogging and, as I photographed them, one put his hand down the back of his partner's pants in a gesture that was more than mere fondness.

I ran into

solarbird and snapped a pretty good photo of her from my vantage point. When I caught up to her and

annathepiper, she said she'd tried to return the favor but the batteries in her camera were dead.

There were cops galore everywhere, blocking off streets, keeping people from being run over, and generally doing a better than usual job of keeping the peace. This was a peaceable rally, not an anarchistic nightmare like we had during the WTO. There were mounted cops, their horses leaving scads of horse shit everywhere, and bicycle cops, and even a Segway cop. There were newsvans from KOMO and FOX. There were tables for socialists, anti-war demonstrators, and pro-Palestinian efforts-- I don't get those, do they really think there's that much, not common cause, but just even overlap with the interests of gays and lesbians?

The sound was awful. Omaha and I tried to listen to the speakers, but the sound kept cutting out on the repeater speakers behind us, and sometimes an annoying echo effect crept into the mix.

Vicious Meme Replicators

There were scads of vicious meme replicators claiming that if we didn't submit to their zombie's telepathic demands something very bad was going to happen to us. It wasn't just one knot, either; there were competing churches, there were guys with shoulder-mounted portable amplification systems, there were varying degrees of threats and promise. There was even a Korean church with its own independent, promise-based posters, staying away from the big, burly guys threating hellfire and damnation.

But the crowd was full of kyootness, which kept me interested. I photographed kyootness in the set below.

After the rally, Omaha and I stopped by Lush where she bought some stuff for the kids, and then we took a bus back to where I'd parked the car, out in the light industrial district. It was better than trying to get into downtown and find a place to park; faster and cheaper, since we both own pre-paid bus passes. We didn't get home until nearly five, at which point we were pretty tired from the walking.