AND THE AGITATOR AWARD GOES TO

I’m agitated today and the Laundry is a good place to be for that. There are at least 16 agitators in here not counting the other people or the dog and even then they would only make 18 though every now and then it rises to 19 when the leather-jacket guy comes in to check on the dryer. But Emma is quiet and the woman sitting in my usual space is reading so they don’t seem agitated right now. It’s just me and the 15 inner workings of the washing machines. I’m irritated by the limited help that I’m getting from my San Antonio book publisher on promoting my book. There, that’s it. I have calmed down some though after filling a page with the f-word (my mother is reading this) in the many ways it can be used in a sentence. That helped me blow off steam and see that the biggest frustration is not having enough time to work my day job, write on two different manuscripts, and market a book that’s been out for ten months without much selling success in a city where 5 million visitors come every year and a state where Texas History is required for every child in public school. San Antonio is key to TX history. I’m not the only one that made a model of one of the five missions out of toothpicks. Besides, I was told that schools were a secondary market when my chapter on a juicy, online sex-solicitation blackmail story got cut. I forgot that there was a classroom audience. My bad. Besides, what’s the difference between a story about a whorehouse and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the husband and wife tag-team solicitors presenting settlement agreements to entrapped paramours except that the incidents were over 100 years apart. I know. Online-sexual encounters and school children are a sore subject even if the children aren’t involved. However, it did seem like a teaching opportunity though not the kind the adolescent boys would take away. I agree on that point entirely. (FYI, my editor and friend, Patrick, has been very helpful so he’s good. This is a corporate agitation-causing shenanigan and the business of books.)

Okay, I feel better.

I will be in San Antonio hopefully doing some book signings (see above) April 11-13 and in Dallas April 14-17. For those of you in Dallas, I’ll be letting you know about the book signing open house on Sunday afternoon, April 15.

To more interesting agitators and topics: the jailhouse theme of the sandwich shop fits very well with peaceful, non-violent resistance types of agitators. I’ve only been arrested twice for civil disobedience and those were pretty staged, nothing like the kind with billy clubs, fire hoses, police dogs, tear gas, and bullets. Nothing like that at all. In D.C. the plastic handcuffs on my wrists in front of me kept coming off and I had the darnedest time keeping them on to maintain the image of resistance. My jail time experiences (or experience as one of the two I paid my fine only 20 steps from the police wagon that brought me in after which I walked about 20 steps to and out the front door of the police station) were not particularly world-shaking though they taught me a lot, especially because of the people who I was arrested with.

The first time was in Cleveland, Ohio in May, 2000, outside the United Methodist Church (UMC) General Conference, the major big deal, every four years, lasts for two weeks, legislative branch of the denomination meeting. They conduct their business much like Capitol Hill with committees, sub-committees, bills/amendments/propositions, lobbyists and blowhards but without the sensitivity about prayer or the separation of Church and State. Not that C&S are separated, check out Institute for Religion and Democracy (i.e. Religion for the Unification of C&S) and their plan to take over the leadership in the UM, Presbyterian, and Epicopal Church denominations and the correlation of how that will infect Congress with a Christian Conservative agenda. I met the then executive director of IRD months before the General Conference. We were sitting at the same table for dinner. I’d lost my name tag, so he didn’t know who he was sitting and chatting with. Nor did I as I was new to the gig. We’d gotten pretty familiar before he asked what organization I was with and we realized that we were each talking with the enemy. We paused in silence for a moment and then went on with our conversation. Make of that what you will.

Back to agitators, the organizers of this arrest were Mel White and his group, Soulforce. Several historic figures of civil rights and civil disobedience were in their number, informing their spiritual foundations and direct actions. Some of these included Arun Ghandi, grandson of Mahatma Ghandi; Yolanda King, Martin King’s daughter; Jim Lawson, a leading strategist on peaceful non-violent resistance in the civil rights movement including the training of the students who staged the lunch counter sit-ins and the Freedom Rides; and Robert Graetz, who had his house bombed after he stood with King during the Montgomery bus boycott. In earlier arrest, these folks and their ancestors were not shackled in plastic, slip-off handcuffs.

I forgot to say that we were demonstrating against the UMC’s policy and practice of discriminating against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (“Queer” in political parlance) people. We were outside the Cleveland Convention Center where the conference was held. Everything was well planned. The mayor’s office and Cleveland police all knew ahead of time what we were doing, all 218 of us. After a walk around the center in silence, we lined up 20 at a time in the driveway so that we blocked traffic. It was a very moving experience if only for the company of people who I was arrested with. Their historic roads of heartache and persistence in the ugliness of violent discrimination gave credence to our cause. Still I knew that as I was in the holding cell, later finger-printed, frisked, and put in a regular cell that I was not suffering as those that had gone before me. Another civil rights mentor and dear friend who I was arrested with was Gil Caldwell, the co-author of one of the manuscripts I’m working on (and why agitators are on my mind). He has continued to teach me about the realities of racial discrimination even as he says I am teaching him about Queer civil rights.

The next day when Goliath-over-David arrests were made inside the convention center on the floor of the conference, we weren’t so organized but we got through. Picture 35 or so people disrupting Senate proceedings and you’ll have a bit of the picture. Okay, so the convention center auditorium is also used for basketball games but it was that somber –a line of us going down the center aisle between rows and rows of tables, seating 1,000 delegates, the room in utter silence and solemnity. Now that was a traumatic experience, several amps up from standing in a driveway blocking traffic. I could feel the anger and hatred rising like steam from those who despised us (voting tallies would say that there were about 650 of that sentiment, though some of those just found us distasteful). The scene got especially harrowing when a woman, not in our group, almost jumped off the balcony above us in an anguished and tearful lament. I’ve never seen 6 white men in dark suits scramble so fast to move the table below out of the way and somehow prepare to catch her –it would not have been pretty. Fortunately, upstairs other men caught her legs and body and pulled her down. What followed were several intense hours of negotiations, reports, and votes, ending with the group moving up onto the stage just behind the presiding bishop. Quickly the Cleveland police entered stage right and arrested the protestors including a couple of bishops who joined the group as they were taken away. I had left the floor earlier with another coalition leader during a break so that we could bail the group out of jail. They were released several hours later after an $11,000 credit card charge, biggest bill I ever signed. I did not leave a tip.

The arrest in D.C. was outside the Catholic Bishops Conference. The difference between Catholic and Protestant demonstrations was that the Catholic songs that we sang as we circled were in Latin instead of English. Other than that it was the same. I was getting terribly sick as we stood out in the cold and drizzle. By the time we got to the police station, all I could think about was getting back to the hotel and bed. But then I recognized a woman two people in front of me. She was one of the drag queens that threw the first spiked heels at the New York City policemen in what is now known as Stonewall, the riot that many mark as the beginning of the Queer rights movement. (Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots for more history.) I was in line paying my fee before I caught a car back to my sickbed and I realized that yet again I’d been arrested with someone that was there in one of those important beginnings with the real tear gas, barricades, and time of sacrifice. She was still fighting, resisting, and inspiring. And for those who are wondering, she was wearing tennis shoes.

My heart is with these agitators today and the machine kind too. This part of the wash cycle is essential to jarring the dirt out of the fabric (social or otherwise) –some loads need more than others. I’ve found it tricky to time pushing clothes I forgot to put in the machine down into the suds before the agitation starts. One, the sudden change makes me jump. Two, agitators aren’t called agitators for nothing; they can beat your hand up pretty badly (different from the non-violent kind). The rinse cycle eventually comes and then the spin, much like press conferences and damage control. Then the moment of truth arrives, did the wash come clean or is there still more dirty laundry?