On Oct. 17, the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) and its allies in the Party for Socialism and Liberation conducted a workshop about organizing and activism in the Los Angeles LGBT community at this year’s Models of Pride. MOP is an annual conference held on the campus of Occidental College that brings together LGBT and straight college and high school students to discuss developments in the community.
 Peta Lindsay, ANSWER Coalition |
ANSWER’s workshop centered on a screening of “On These Shoulders We Stand,” a new documentary about the historic role that Los Angeles played in the pre-Stonewall era. The documentary features first-hand accounts of both the repression that LGBT people faced and how the community organized and fought back during that period. It is a little known history, and the film set a militant tone to the discussion that followed.
The documentary features footage of massive street demonstrations that erupted in the wake Proposition 8’s passage. Prop. 8 overturned the right of same-sex couples to marriage in California. The largest protest was organized by the ANSWER Coalition in L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood. Images of a multinational crowd of 20,000 protesters, both gay and straight, are shown in the film. People are chanting and filling the streets to denounce Prop. 8 and anti-gay bigotry.
Students at the Models of Pride workshop packed the workshop room and shared personal experiences of being targeted by police and school officials for discrimination and harassment. They also recounted the organizing they were doing on their campuses in response to acts of violence, discrimination and budget cuts.
The panel discussion was lead by ANSWER organizers and PSL members Lucilla Esguerra, Peta Lindsay, Carlos Alvarez and this writer. Esguerra gave a report on the student work being done at UCLA, Cal State Long Beach, Cal State Fullerton and Los Angeles City College. Alvarez, a leader of the LGBT movement in L.A., stressed the importance of militant struggle and organizing within the LGBT community and among all working-class people.
Lindsay, a graduate of Howard University, cited strategies used during the Civil Rights struggle as key to countering current police repression against the LGBT community. “You are told to wait and to go along and maybe eventually you’ll win equality, but it isn’t true,” she said. “You don’t have to wait. The only way to win full equality is by waging an organized struggle.”
Another special guest participant at the workshop was Nancy Valverdes, a Latina lesbian activist who was featured in “On These Shoulders We Stand.” She is known for fighting against and defeating the Los Angeles Police Department’s discriminatory “masquerading” laws in 1959. Valverdes urged all the students attending to stay involved in the struggle for equality. “United with can make real change for our community,” she declared.
