Equality Camp

Has the time finally come?

I sure hope so.

And by that I mean the time for people who have felt shunted aside and otherwise silenced in their anger and frustration over the failure that was the No on 8 Campaign to feel that their concerns have been heard. I mean no disrespect to those whose voices have been raised – often stridently. After all, to paraphrase from the Academy Award winning film Milk – I know they’re angry. I’m angry too.

But since the emotionally (though not statistically) crushing loss on Proposition 8, there has been a perception that the voices of the general community were being ignored by those who ran the campaign.

Over the last months, several of the Executive Committee members (largely Kate Kendell and Geoff Kors but also some others including Tawal Panyacosit) have spent quite a bit of time talking about what happened during the campaign. Many questions have been answered, but still the  outcry for a more public mea culpa has grown. Fueled in part by dedicated and vocal bloggers like Michael Petrelis, the dull roar of disappointment has burbled its way from month to month.

Until tonight.

From 6pm to 9pm (Pacific) in San Francisco’s Bill Graham Civic Auditorium this evening several hundred people gathered for the chance of a public hearing of their questions, but more importantly a chance to air their comments. If you’ve never been, the Civic Auditorium is a cavernous space, as you can see in this shot (which was not taken tonight, but after some concert).

Interior of the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium

For  this evening’s Town Hall they set out 1,000 chairs, and by the time things got started, by eyeballing the room it looked to me that about half of the seats were taken.  Michael Petrelis actually got some nice photos and posted them along with his initial thoughts from tonight’s gathering, which you can read here.

To be fair, this wasn’t technically the first public forum. There was an attempt to give people a chance to hear from the Executive Committee at the Equality Summit in LA at the end of January. But most who were there would probably say that the session there did more to fuel frustration than anything else. The process for taking questions was cumbersome and as a result more than 150 questions never got answered.

In early February, I sat down with Kate, Geoff and Tawal for a 90 minute discussion, in which they endeavored to answer quite a few of those questions. The live stream I set up broke about 2/3 of the way through, so here’s the first chunk of our conversation:

Proposition 8: A discussion of what happened – Part 1 from Cathy Brooks on Vimeo

And here’s part two:

Proposition 8: A discussion of what happened – Part 2 from Cathy Brooks on Vimeo

— Cathy