While The Queer Ally Coalition planned tomorrow’s Candlelight Vigil against anti-gay violence a while ago, the event has now taken on renewed interest after a few recent and serious gay bashings near Capitol Hill along with the gay bar ricin scare over just the past two months.
The spokesperson said East Precinct is aware of the vigil and is planning to support the event with officers and traffic control.
Capitol Hill Seattle blog has a breakdown of the recent attacks.
Lonnie Lopez, who is helping coordinate the event, issued a statement which included:
Ultimately, we need more and more people to become self-conscious organizers in the fight to end homophobia. It won’t be easy. It won’t be everyone. There will be meetings in which only a few people show up. There will be actions that are sparsely attended. But that’s the way it needs to be done. That’s the way civil rights have always been won and how bigotry has always been fought.
The Stranger’s blog chimed in on the issue:
Vigils may seem a wimpy tactic to counter violence. Some folks believe that, rather than lighting candles, the gays need to go out and kick some ass. Defending the streets is a need going unmet. But a candlelight march is a good start at increasing visibility.
Queers Unite! Take Back The Night! is Saturday, February 28, 2009 from 8:00pm – 9:30pm.
Meet at the Pillars located at Boren Ave. and Pike St.
More info here but you need to be a Facebook member to see it.
Please allow me to post my full response to an inquiry regarding what we can achieve with a vigil.
Well, the vigil itself will achieve very little. Only people actively organizing in our community can achieve anything. We want to be honest with people and let them know that our marching down the street will not end homophobia. But it can serve as the first step in the process for building a movement that can end homophobia. And its a strong counter to the demoralizing effects that gay bashing has on the community. On our path to winning, we need to build confidence that we CAN win.
First and foremost, we want to inform people of the fact that there are hate crimes being committed against lgbt people in Seattle and actually around the country. Strange as it may seem, there are still a lot of people who don’t know this is happening or don’t understand the extent to which hate crimes are happening. It’s definitely NOT a local issue or a question of a few bad apples with bad ideas roaming the streets.
Second, we want to make the connection with people that we need to organize to protect ourselves and demand full equality NOW instead of simply waiting for the next bad thing to happen. Anytime there is an anti-gay initiative or law passed, anti-gay hate crimes rise. Any time the government authorizes discrimination against any particular group of people, whether it be Arabs and Muslims, immigrants, African-Americans, you name the targeted group, there is a rise in crimes and discrimination against those groups. The passage of Prop 8 gave tacit approval to bigots to go out and attack lgbt people, so the loss of prop 8 not only means the loss at the ballot box or the loss of civil rights, it also means that some of us are losing blood and even our lives. African-Americans organized, protested, debated, and shaped a civil rights movement decades ago and because of their work, there are many many fewer lynchings in the South. I’m reminded of MLK’s words: ““It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.” When we organize for full equality, whether it be marriage rights, employment and worker rights, or the simple right to be free from physical violence, the bigots back down and fewer queers die.
Third, the QuAC is a simple group of mostly young people (I’m the oldest at 34) who see the need to organize and fight back. Most members are very new to activism and its just common sense for them that people SHOULD stand up to bigotry. We’re broke like everyone else, we all work jobs, but we are compelled to do something. Not a single one of the large lgbt groups have addressed these attacks, even by press release. Not a single of the large lgbt groups, with their thousands of our dollars, has begun to raise the question of how we should respond to these attacks. Politics abhors a vacuum and in the absence of leadership, people rise to become their own leaders. We’ve debated and discussed trying to build a program coming out of this about how we should respond to hate crimes in our community. We recognized that we were too small, too inexperienced, and too lacking in resources to put together a program like Q Patrol or the Pink Panthers and so we’d like to make a call out to interested people to get involved, share ideas, develop a program, initiate the dialogue. I suggest we follow the lead of the Seattle Commission for Sexual Minorites and Gay City in developing a sort of rapid response hate incident system on our own (instead of relying on the data collection of the SPD). We’re against simply telling the community “This is what we must do! Now do it!” None of us has the answers, but we believe that the lgbt and allied community, with its wealth of experience and creativity, CAN come up with good ideas. And there’s no better time than now.
We’re hoping we can put togher a public forum on the violence in our community and bring people together to come up with solutions. Our small group is already being contacted by hate crimes survivors, which is good and bad. It’s good in the sense that we’re drawing attention to issues that desperately need to be addressed, but it’s bad in the sense that it reveals the lack of a genuine lgbt rights movement in this city and state. With all the good work that ERW had done and continues to do, they are simply ill equipped to respond to these crimes given their current structure and focus. Ultimately, we need more and more people to become self-conscious organizers in the fight to end homophobia. It won’t be easy. It won’t be everyone. There will be meetings in which only a few people show up. There will be actions that are sparsely attended. But that’s the way it needs to be done. That’s the way civil rights have always been won and how bigotry has always been fought.
Twenty, ten, even five years ago, few people thought we would have a black president in our lifetime. Now we do. It’s time to expect and demand what they told us was impossible. When Sean Penn can win an Oscar for his portrayal of an openly gay politician, it is simply absurd that queers can not walk down the street in the gay neighborhood in Seattle without fear of being attacked. It’s now time to turn all that talk of hope into real change. I believe that we can.