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Vigils
One Saturday morning in 1967 I joined a small
group of Quakers standing in silent opposition to the escalating war in Vietnam. We stood on a downtown street corner next
to the capital grounds in my native Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I was a high school junior. My mother was worried about my
safety; my father, a veteran, did not approve. Some yahoos yelled at us from cars; I remember some tossed tomatoes. I don’t
remember exactly what led me to tumble out of bed that weekend morning and to stand silent with a group of White strangers
gathered around a solitary banner. I don’t remember the exact words on that banner, but I’m certain this decision on this
Saturday morning became the foundation of my political/social activism that has carried forth through today.
I spent
several afternoons and evenings a week after that manning the tiny Harrisburg Area Peace Center store front. Hanging out
with older activists, street people, hippies and hippy wannabes. I handed out leaflets, did my schoolwork, and talked with
anyone who straggled through the door. An “End the War Now” bumper sticker was affixed to my notebook for the rest of the
school year.
I remember waking up to do my morning paper route one June morning in 1968 to be the first my family to
learn of the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Martin Luther King had been murdered earlier that spring. That summer I worked
for the political campaign of Eugene McCarthy, volunteering at the Market Square headquarters. I remember watching on a black
& white T.V. with my fellow volunteers, all of us in shock, as the police rioted in the Chicago streets during the Democratic
Convention.
I remember spending the night in Perry Square in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1969. Now a college freshman, I
was part of a group taking turns reading the names of the war dead from books the size of telephone directories. I shuddered
when it was my turn to read and I came to Jones, Charles, USMC – the name of my grandfather, my uncle and my legal self.
I remember a year later stenciling bloody fists on the walls of the college buildings after the murder by national guardsmen
of students at Kent State and (the always parenthetical) Jackson State.
I remember that when the first Vietnam War
draft lottery was drawn my birthday, June 8, was number 366 (out of 366) but I was one year too young to be included. When
the subsequent lottery was drawn June 8 was number 7, but deferments were still given to college students. During my draft
physical I was given the 1-Y (don’t call us, we’ll (probably not) call you) status after talking very frankly with the Army
shrink about psychedelic drug use, sexual orientation and a lame suicide attempt. I dropped out of college to travel the
world.
I remember after spending almost a year raising semi-prohibited pigs on kibbutz in Israel marching in a May
Day parade in Tel Aviv chanting, in Hebrew, “What is good for the worker is good for Israel.” – Something like “Ma she tov
l’hapolim, tov l’israel.”
I remember marches on Washington in the 1980’s – for Gay rights, against the Klan, for the
rights of Palestinians to determine their future, in solidarity with the people of El Salvador. I remember chanting, sore
feet and the smell of tear gas.
I remember marching up Fifth Avenue with my boyfriend on Gay Pride.
I remember
marching up Fifth Avenue with my girlfriend against nukes.
I remember standing in front of the United States embassy
in Managua, Nicaragua and singing a song that one of my fellow artists, Robbie McCauley, had written to protest our government’s
support of the Contras. I remember denouncing this U.S. support in a statement I gave on Managua radio.
I remember
trying to combine my politics and my art making and sometimes succeeding. I danced naked blindfolded to a sound score of
pro-American jingoistic songs; I wrestled with a dead goat on a bare mattress; I crawled across a stage on my back, a light
glaring into my face, a heavy cement block on my chest.
In the 1990s I remember marching against the spread of AIDS
and our government’s apathy toward the pandemic.
I remember once or twice a week delivering food to people left homebound
by the disease. I’d carry meals to walk-up apartments in the East Village and in most cases leave immediately like the delivery
boy that I was. Eventually people would disappear from my list. Either they’d gotten better, or …
I remember not
accepting my National Endowment for the Arts fellowship because an anti homoerotic and obscenity clause had been added. A
year later someone on staff at the NEA allowed me to obtain the funds without signing.
I remember “getting on with
my life.” Burying parents, buying a home, archiving my work, combining my politics and my art making with a money making
job.
And then last night, I stood in the rain at Union Square in New York. I stood there with a few hundred people
in what passes in this city as a “silent” candlelight vigil marking the one-thousandth American soldier killed in the 2004
Iraqi War. I found my friend Lucy with her one and a half year old daughter Annabel Clare. At home Lucy has a photograph
of her parents with her and her siblings at a Vietnam War protest. I took a picture of Lucy and Annabel to be a companion
image to that other photo. A sad but resilient continuum.
As I stood in the rain, trying to keep my votive candle
lit and counting the number of other colored folks present, (never enough compared with the brown faces pictured next to the
obits in the papers), this deluge of memories flooded over me. As some of the crowd sang quietly, anemically “We Shall Overcome,”
“Where have all the Flowers Gone,” and “Give Peace a Chance,” I thought to myself, I’m tired, I’m so tired. A double-decker
tour bus is stopped at the traffic light and our crowd turns, raises peace signs and sings louder, stronger. Cameras flash
on both sides. The bus drives on. I’m just so tired.
10 September 2004
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