Breaking the silence on gay rights

Twelve years ago a group of 35 gay people marched in Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

Standing on the parade route … all of a sudden you just hear police sirens. These big, beefy Irish cops formed this human shield around them. People threw beer bottles on the marchers as well as spit on them.

A priest shouted “Shame, shame” before turning his back on the group. One woman bent down and handed her child a rock.

“Throw the rock. Throw the rock. Kill the fags,” the woman said.

“That was 12 years ago, and we haven’t stopped throwing rocks in this country.”

The Rev. Tim Cutzmark, a local Unitarian minister, last week described that St. Patrick’s Day scene when he spoke during the Day of Silence.
Sophomore Jeremy Kidd, president of Queer Action, the organization that sponsored the daylong event, described it as a time “to draw attention to GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) people, to make people aware of how awkward it is.”

The day began with a march at 11 a.m. that started at Monroe Park and moved down East Main, Ninth and Franklin streets. Michelle Bronson, the march organizer and a VCU graduate student, said the time element created a problem with people marching. Nevertheless, she wanted people to see the marchers while they were driving during their lunch break.

“It was a little difficult because the march was in the middle of the week on a weekday,” she said.

Some marchers wore X-shape tape covering their mouths to indicate silence and carried signs with line-drawings related to the words stop, think and act. Some images depicted two bound women attempting to kiss and two men with mouths sewn shut.

“(The tape the marchers wore) re-emphasizes the fact that we were silenced,” she said. “It was another visual cue.”

About 50 people marched, and some told her afterward that the march left an impact on them.

“People came up to me saying, ‘I’ve never dreamed I would participate in an event like this,’ and ‘This has really opened me up,’ ” Bronson said.
Queer Action’s Web site reported that about 100 people participated in the silence last Wednesday.

“Day of Silence is a great day to get people involved who wouldn’t normally be involved in queer activism,” Kidd said.

During the event, Cutzmark voiced his concern with President George W. Bush and his stance on same-sex marriages.

“Our president is throwing big rocks, and that is really dangerous,” he said. “I believe Bush is evil. The first thing we have to do is get rid of Bush. It is important to vote Bush out because of the damage he will do in another four years.”

Cutzmark brought up the legalization of sodomy, saying before it became legalized, it was grouped with bestiality under the law.

“Until last summer, I could not lie in bed with my partner without committing a crime,” he said.

He also discussed the Bible and the way people use and misinterpret the Bible to look down on gay people.

“The Bible is a book and it’s an old book,” he said. “It is not a book written by God reaching down from the clouds. … We’ve got a book that’s got a lot of crap in it. I’m one minister that believes the Bible is not the truth.”

Delegate Adam Ebbin, D-Alexandria, the only openly gay member of the Virginia General Assembly, was not scheduled to speak but stopped by to say, “Happy day of silence.”

Ebbin had just come from a meeting of the House of Delegates where a bill to recognize same-sex unions failed, he said.

“It’s really interesting to talk to these representatives who recognize me as a person but not my rights,” he said.

Still, he said he preferred to look at the glass as half-full rather than half-empty.

“It’s slow and it’s painful, but I think that we are making progress,” Ebbin said.

Kidd then opened the floor to anyone who participated in the march.
Leanna Eaton, a first-year psychology major, told the group about how her mother uprooted her from her high school because she thought her gay friends were “brainwashing” her. She said the Day of Silence caused her to reflect on people who bash gay people.

“(Gay-bashers) don’t understand that any right is really a right,” she said. “I was just trying to think of ways to respond to (those people).”

Justin R