Marching with S.A.M.E. at the San Diego Pride Parade (tags)
A lot of progressive Queers and Queer-friendly allies have written off the annual Pride events as overly commercial, corporate and mainstream. But that's not what it felt like to me when I marched with the San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality (S.A.M.E.) in San Diego's Pride Parade July 16. In a mixed contingent that also included members of the Bradley Manning Support Group and the International Socialist Organization, I felt like part of a movement, participating in an island of militant political awareness that asserted the values on which Pride was founded that have largely got lost in the overall celebration. With nine S.A.M.E. members facing criminal charges for seeking marriage licenses following the federal district court ruling declaring Proposition 8 unconstitutional, some of the signs the contingent carried linked their members -- and Bradley Manning -- to notorious American political prisoners of the past.
Death of an AIDS Dissident (tags)
A meditation on the recent death of H.E.A.L. [Health, Education, AIDS Liaison]-San Diego board member Jerry Colinard and the insistence that, as David Crowe of Rethinking AIDS and the Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society put it in a recent interview for Zenger's Newsmagazine, “If you’re an HIV-positive dissident, you’re not allowed to die of anything else other than AIDS.” Originally published as an editorial in the August 2009 issue of Zenger's Newsmagazine.
Memorial Service for Ferd Eggan (tags)
Ferd Eggan, writer, activist, revolutionary, died 07/07/07 of liver cancer related to AIDS.