The May 1 counterdemonstration at Safeco Field was a huge success, judging from the 3,000 gay-marriage supporters who turned out to steal the thunder from thousands of fundamentalist Christians who came to town to rally against civil marriage rights. Instead of highlighting rhetoric from the conservative “Mayday for Marriage” program, or spotlighting keynote speaker James Dobson of right-wing Focus on the Family, the media reported on the face-off in Seattle surrounding the event (“Thousands clash at rally to protest gay marriage,” wrote the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette in Indiana). Visibility, the number one goal of the protest, was certainly accomplished. “It was all over the nation,” says Bill Dubay, a gay activist with the Seattle chapter of Don’t Amend, who helped coordinate the Saturday counterprotest. “They were talking about the whole thing, they weren’t just talking about one side or the other.” (Score one for gay rights activists, who didn’t let Dobson’s sound bites frame the debate but instead won coverage of a day that was laced with arguments for gay marriage.)
The successful counterprotest wasn’t the only highlight of the weekend. The gay community in Seattle– and Washington State, for that matter–finally seems to have found a leader: Michael McAfoose, the guy who pulled Saturday’s counterprotest together. He’s suddenly a star, fielding calls from national radio hosts and volunteers alike who want to know what’s next. They’re smart to look to McAfoose: In a little over a week, he called together a handful of gay activists and pulled off the biggest gathering of protesters in recent memory (possibly ever) for a gay rights issue in Seattle. And he’s not stopping now that the fundamentalists have hopped back on their buses to go home; McAfoose is also a central figure in creating a statewide organization–Equality Washington–equipped to handle the fight for gay rights in Washington, and he’s itching to get to work.
While the marriage debate has been raging around the country, there’s been little organized leadership in Seattle to support gay rights. Though there are numerous smaller organizations in town–and plenty of gay activists, not to mention gay residents and their friends who’d love to help the cause–the various groups weren’t working together on a coherent strategy to fight for civil marriage, to support the passage of a civil rights bill in Washington, or to fend off attacks from groups like Saturday’s Mayday for Marriage. Indeed, there’s not a single paid, full-time staffer in Washington working on gay rights–a person with the resources to monitor for events like Mayday for Marriage, and give the community more than a week to mobilize.
Enter McAfoose. He has been an organizer and an activist for a dozen years–working on issues from tenants’ rights to medical privacy, and most recently overseeing a dozen gay and women’s organizations from his office in the basement of the LGBT Community Center on East Pike Street, where he’s the head of Gay Community Social Services. He’s also involved in putting together Equality Washington–which (finally!) gelled on May 3–equipped to both strategize in the long term and respond quickly when necessary. “It clearly needs to be a statewide coalition,” says McAfoose, a thirtysomething guy who lives in a First Hill apartment. “People want to have an organization that’s going to move without a lot of ridiculous process, and an organization that’s going to step up to the plate, make the hard decisions, implement them, and move forward. That’s how I feel about it.”
McAfoose skipped over the bullshit two weeks before Dobson’s crew headed into town–local gays were busy debating whether or not to put energy into doing anything at Safeco–and called together a handful of people to make fliers, get the word out, and get people to the stadium. On Saturday, McAfoose hopped from one corner of Safeco to another, megaphone in one hand and lemon-lime Gatorade in the other, making sure things ran smoothly. Alternating between greeting politicians and everyday protesters (“Thank you so much for coming,” McAfoose said sincerely, shaking the hands of protesters lining First Avenue), McAfoose kept spirits high, and kept the police in the loop about the protesters’ plans. “I’m on cloud nine right now,” he said, surveying the vast crowd before he bounced off to check in with the Infernal Noise Brigade marching band.
McAfoose is now shifting his energy to Equality Washington, which he’s been involved with since January, when it was just an ad hoc group of activists bent on starting a more organized movement. He’s been mentioned as a possible leader of the nascent statewide organization, if either of the current co-chairs steps down (one was reportedly considering it, as the workload involved with launching a large-scale organization is huge, and it’s a volunteer position). But even if he’s not heading up the group, he’ll still have influence on it–he’s been pushing for the organization to be set up with several branches, so it can do lobbying, education, activism, and fundraising. Tedious issues like the group’s tax status can limit what activities it can do, and McAfoose would rather see a multi-modal group that can tackle gay rights from every angle, than a one-dimensional nonprofit that’s politically limited.
At the Equality Washington meeting on Monday, May 3–bumped up several days to jump off of the energy from the Saturday protest–the organization took a cue from McAfoose, and took action on minutiae they’d been debating for weeks. They made progress on adopting bylaws, changed their name to Equality Washington (it had been Discrimination Free Washington) to hopefully sync up with the already-established political action committee Basic Rights Washington, and chose a tax status–they’ll be both a 501(c)(3) and a 501(c)(4), which allows them to jump into politics.
Now that the group is almost completely set up, it’s not hard to imagine the energetic McAfoose leading the statewide-activism arm. While planning the Mayday counterdemonstration, he was already brainstorming on ways to parlay the enthusiasm to protest at Safeco into a longer-range plan. “I’m going to do direct-action training this summer,” McAfoose says, envisioning groups ready to go to Olympia on a moment’s notice to help lobby for a gay rights bill, or fight against a discriminatory one. He’s also organizing a youth group that will travel to Eastern Washington to drum up support in Spokane and register people to vote. Plans for a summer fundraiser with Seattle bands are also in the works. More immediately, other groups plan to hold a rally on May 17 at 5:30 p.m. at Seattle Central Community College, coinciding with the beginning of legal gay marriage in Massachusetts.
To get involved with Equality Washington, call 206-324-2570.
