At about 9:15 p.m. on August 30, my police scanner came across this nervous transmission from a TV newswoman to her producer: “They’re not doing what they told us they would. They were supposed to march to the precinct house. Now there’s two or three hundred sitting down on Broadway at 100th Street. If I pull cable here, we’ll never get back. And this is a very dramatic shot. It’s a tough call. Damn, some other network people just set up.”
So the house rules were announced from shot one. This was to be collaborative theater art. Any successful act of civil disobedience requires collusion between media, protest, and establishment. Here several hundred gay men and women had commandeered an unprepossessing uptown intersection. They lit candles. They shouted, with no talent for etymology, “Homophobia has to go.” They wore T-shirts that said act up. It was an out-take from 1968. I would’ve ignored them: let sparse Broadway traffic extravasate around on West End Avenue or Amsterdam. But the law, prodded, has reflexes. It will act by rote: like the stoplight, unaware of political or moral consequence, that blinked red/green nonsensically all night long.
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