AEGiS-BAR: Smoke and mirrors

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2000. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Smoke and mirrors

Bay Area Reporter - May 5, 2000

Well, it's over. The Millennium March on Washington came and went last weekend, and while, by most published accounts, the celebration was enjoyable for the hundreds of thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender folks who attended, from where we observed it over C-SPAN, the rally seemed to be one long speech and a glorified campaign event for Vice President Al Gore. Did the vice president show up? No, he could only send a videotaped message that was played over huge television monitors. The Human Rights Campaign endorsed Gore early - before the March 7 Super Tuesday primaries - and all he could do for HRC's biggest event in years was to send the standard greeting, like his boss, President Clinton; they did the same at the 1993 March on Washington.

From the stage, HRC Executive Director Elizabeth Birch unabashedly told the crowd that the most important thing the LGBT community could do was to elect Gore president in November.

Maybe that was the problem with the march; organizers should have admitted months ago that it was really a big Democratic Party lovefest and left it at that.

We've got nothing against Democrats, or Al Gore for that matter, but let's be honest - there were no profound messages at Sunday's rally, just hours of speechifying by mostly the famous of our communities.

March organizers grossly inflated attendance numbers - there's no way nearly 1 million people were there, or even 500,000. Early on, one of the speakers announced an attendance figure of 310,000, which we find more credible, but probably inaccurate. The Ad Hoc Committee for an Open Process placed attendance at 125,000, and went into great detail about how they arrived at that figure. Our Washington correspondent, who has attended numerous marches on Washington, placed attendance at about half of what it was at the 1993 event.

What's next? For starters, the MMOW board must release financial information as quickly as possible. That they were begging for money repeatedly from the stage casts great doubt on the promise made before the march that $500,000 in "profits" would be distributed to community groups. We certainly hope no nonprofit organization has penciled any money from MMOW into their budget - and if they have, they better start working on finding funds from alternative sources. That money isn't coming back to the community; it should though, as MMOW had all those corporate sponsors who presumably paid in cash to have their advertising banners posted all over the place.

It just goes to show that groups shouldn't make promises they can't keep. There's a similar accountability problem here at home. Just a few months ago, ACT UP/San Francisco told us that its "books are open." Now, however, comes word that seven members of the AIDS denialist group have formed a secret trust, designed to hide information on how profits from ACT UP/San Francisco's medical marijuana operation - and other income sources - are spent.

No one from ACT UP/San Francisco would confirm the existence of the GTT Trust - in fact one of the co-trustees actually told us he knew nothing about it.

Now that's denial.

A couple of weeks ago we challenged ACT UP/San Francisco to explain how members can claim that "AIDS is over" and "HIV doesn't exist" then turn around and sell medical marijuana to people living with HIV/AIDS. Well, last week we got our answer, and what a bunch of hyperbole it was: It's not ACT UP/San Francisco that's being hypocritical, we were told, it's the people living with HIV/AIDS who buy the pot from ACT UP/San Francisco who are the hypocrites.

This message puts profits first, which is in fact the same argument they use against the drug companies they criticize.

That ACT UP/San Francisco members should turn on their own customers when their ludicrous arguments fail them is no surprise.

So there you have it. ACT UP/San Francisco cares nothing about anyone, not even its own clients.

Put that in your pipe and smoke on it while you're at the Millennium Marijuana March this Saturday.

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