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| Patricks
Weekend
- NYC - 2001 |
Online
Magazine ‘The Gully’ currently have a feature on St Patricks day in
New York 2001.
The St.
Patrick's Day Parade, the biggest and most public annual political
networking event in town, bans lesbians and gays from openly marching in
it. In a city of immigrants, being banned from your own people's parade
because you're gay means being stripped of your nationality, cast out of
your family, deprived of half your soul. It is a particularly cruel form
of hatred. In the case of the St. Patrick's Day Parade, it has practical
consequences, as well: you're excluded from the network of very tangible,
worldly, political and economic influence that the parade represents and
celebrates. You're disinherited materially, as well as spiritually.
Click here
to visit 'The Gully' for more on this story
| Patricks Weekend
- NYC - 2000 |
(Thanks
to Margot for the review)
The
protest was large -- larger than it has been at least in the past couple
of years. Somewhere around 68 protestors (of whom I think 12 were Irish
citizens, part of a much larger contingent of Irish women and men who
came specifically to take part in the protest) were arrested when they
stepped onto 5th Avenue (at around 5th and 59th st.) and attempted to
march down 5th Avenue.
The
plan this year was not to march IN the parade, but to march before the
parade, in the opposite direction from that in which the parade was
going. If they had been allowed to march unimpeded, they would have been
out of the way before the Ancient Order of Hib's-authorized parade
arrived. But the NYPD set up barricades to prevent them from going
forward, and the protesters sat down in the street, coralled in a tight
formation. In the meantime, the rest of the protestors (I don't know,
maybe there were about 200 of us in all?) circulated on the sidewalk,
chanting "Queers March in Dublin/Queers March in Cork/Why Can't
Queers/March in New York?!" and "We're Queer, We're Green, and
Guiliani's Mean!", and displaying a large number of great signs,
some of them with images of famous Irish queers. I will say for myself
that the sight of marchers being coralled in a cul de sac by cops in riot
gear was eerily reminiscent of the events of Bloody Sunday.
Anyway,
the protesters were left coralled in this tight space for what seemed
like a fairly long time to me -- half an hour? -- and then rapidly loaded
onto a bus. The NYPD kept them for a long time -- longer than usual.
There was a post-protest celebration planned, but when supporters
gathered that evening and found that the protesters were not yet
released, they went en masse to the courthouse to express their support
for those still in custody. This, at least, is what I heard when I
arrived, typically, after everyone had already gone off. The next morning
I got the address of the courthouse from the ILGO hotline and headed over
there myself and some people were still in custody. For folks from
Ireland, especially, who hadn't had any sleep the night BEFORE the night
after the protest, a night in cramped, unsanitary (to say the least),
freezing cold cells with various forms of harassment and game-playing
going on was virtually torture. But the protesters did get fabulous --
indeed, heroic -- legal and other support. Resultantly, everyone WAS
gotten through the system, however painfully. Above all, the
demonstration and the arrests were extremely powerful statements.
I
know that I will certainly never forget how it felt to see friends who I
know for a fact have devoted their whole lives to making Ireland a better
place for Irish people -- women, queer people, poor people -- dragged out
of a public street by armed goons in order to clear the way for phalanxes
of US military personnel, the first participants in the Ancient Order's
surreal display of THEIR warped idea of Irish/Irish-American cultural and
spiritual identity. It was, honestly, more sickening than I could have
imagined. I think that all of us who took part at any level could only
come away with a renewed determination to fight against the forces that
distort and deform our lives, individually and collectively.
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