RAGE IS GOOD makes its first strike in alabama today...
last night, after amy goodman, s and i decided we couldn't sit still in the car as it rumbled home, lulling us back into complacency... "we need to DO something," s said.
we always say this. we make plans. many elaborate, scheming, havoc-raising plans. and then we go to the bar and listen to music and drink a few beers and go to blockbuster and rent a movie.
not always. there was the time we plastered the neighborhood with cardboard signs that we painted in s's front yard, demanding that the city not chop down all of the old-growth trees just because the electric company wanted easier access to the power lines. and the time we wrote "god loves gay people" on those little bible tracts you find in small-town motel lobbies and then left them in public restrooms all over central alabama. and the time we infiltrated "switchback," the religious support group for people who claim to be "ex-gays."
but mostly, we just sit around and complain a lot.
so this time, instead of empty ranting, we grabbed a notebook and a pen, and we went to quest, the gay bar in b'ham. it's bigger than the one in montgomery, but at 10 p.m., it looked and felt more like the kind of macho place i tend to stay away from (or at least only visit in large, protective groups). thick white guys were playing pool in the corner. garth brooks was singing from the juke box. when i ordered a sam adams, the bartender, a flamboyant black man who swiveled his hips when he walked, laughed and said, "this is the QUEST, honey."
so we sat at the bar and drank bud light out of plastic cups and made a plan. that's how all this started. well, no. all this started months ago, as ideas in our heads and collective conscience. last night just added extra fuel.
1 comment:
i realize i never wrote an update. so i'm writing one now in this comment box. :-) later that afternoon, s and i leafleted one of the big chain bookstores in town -- a few months earlier, it had bowed to customer pressure and gotten rid of its gay and lesbian section. and the "women's issues" section was one lousy shelf, half of which was taken up with anne coulter and hillary-bashing books.
so we made up a stack of leaflets covered in type-written, radical propanda and spent an hour sneaking around, stuffing leaflets into books.
we thought it was a form of "shop-giving" -- when some unsuspecting soon-to-be-mom got home with her copy of "the christian guide to parenting," not only would she have her book, but she'd also have a handy little bookmark encouraging her to be more open-minded. :-)
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