Subject: RAINBOW FLAG AT BOSTON PRIDE
From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 1995 18:56:44 -0400

Media Release from:

PRO-LIFE ALLIANCE OF GAYS AND LESBIANS

Post Office Box 33292
Washington, D.C. 20033
(202) 223-6697
Internet:  [email-masked]

For Further Information:
Philip Arcidi
Tel:  (508) 369-0700 

 Pro-Life Gays meet the Rainbow Police   

Looking for a place to get your rainbow flag trampled? Take it to Gay Pride
in Boston.  If your banner has a rainbow  spectrum with the profile of an
unborn child in the middle,  it could end up like ours: knocked to the ground
by some self-proclaimed guardians of queer orthodoxy. On June 10, at  this
year's Pride Festival on the Charles River, I was  accosted by a contingent
of these guardians, out on patrol to bash flags they deemed
counterrevolutionary.   Flags like the one I and a companion, James Geller,
brought that afternoon.   

The politically correct inspection team -- a dozen lesbians  touring the
festival grounds -- pulled down our rainbow flag and trampled it in the dirt.
 Our crime: a flag with the profile of a preborn infant, an image these women
found threatening.  When they saw it, their rational faculties gave way to
paranoia.  They jeered.  They slandered.   Fearful of rational discussion,
they resorted to intimidation. You couldn't concoct a more damaging
caricature of women than  the one they made of themselves.   

Stoked up with hate and fear, they condemned our pro-life perspective as gay
heresy.  Next they crowded around and sat on our table, and stole folders and
surveys we'd brought to Pride.  Having yanked our flag to the ground, they
tried to pull down our companion banner, whose pink script identified  us as
The Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians. The horde labelled us Fascists
and decreed we had no right to be at  Pride.  They were itinerant censors who
turned the afternoon's festivities into a turf war: defending our  property
from seizure, not to mention our Constitutional  right of free speech, was at
stake.  I asked my companion to  get help.  While he looked for the police,
the crowd's jeers  crescendoed as its number increased: the dozen instigators
 had grown to about fifty. They refused to hear the pleas of  at least one
pro-abortion lesbian who told them to stop; the  mob was reeling on its own
momentum.   

The right of free speech was driven into exile that afternoon. Diversity
ceased to be a gay virtue when the  foot soldiers of gay rectitude found two
right to lifers in  their midst.  They said they wanted us banished from
Pride.  They got their wish:  when the police came upon the swarm  around us,
they told us we'd better leave right away,  because they couldn't ensure our
safety if we stayed. It  didn't matter to the police that we weren't the
aggressors,  that we hadn't stolen anyone's property, or that our free
 speech rights bad been silenced by force.   The police's inaction bodes
ominously for all gays and  lesbians: it implies that the rule of the mob
prevails when the gay community gets together.  First amendment rights
  don't matter when you see a bunch of queers waving colored  flags and
enjoying life out of closet doors.  And if you see gays and lesbians abusing
each other, you needn't pretend  that their civil rights are as good as those
of straights;  just let the noisiest queers have their way.   

As I ran the gauntlet that afternoon, I recalled that  Governor Casey of
Pennsylvania, a pro-life Democrat, met a  similar fate in a New York City
auditorium.  Shouted down by  a mob of heckling women, he left with his
speech undelivered.  He did not summon the police; we couldn't  afford to be
so diplomatic.   

I hope New York's police would have been more helpful to the  Governor than
Boston's were to us. Suppose we were encircled  by homophobes, instead of
lesbians, and the police said they  couldn't ensure our safety.  How would
the gay community have reacted to their negligence?  With an uproar.  The
press would  have condemned it as a fiasco of justice.  But when the same
 thing happened at Gay Pride, there was not a word of it in any of the Boston
media.   

Our ouster makes a mockery of the gay community's demand for  inclusion in
mainstream society. How can we claim that gays  and lesbians are as diverse
as the nation if we deny a place  for gay pro-lifers?  When we let a mob
drive pro-life gays from Pride, we trivialize "diversity": it becomes a
hollow  incantation, the whine of a manipulative child. It's time we
 recognized that homophobes don't have a monopoly on  intolerance.  And that
no one has a monopoly on diversity.   

Philip Arcidi  
President, Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians

[BACKGROUND -- PREVIOUS PRESS RELEASE: 

 10 June 1995.  Boston, Massachusetts.   A jeering, threatening crowd of
abortion supporters forced a small contingent of gay pro-lifers to quit the
Boston Gay Pride festival today under protection of a police escort.  The
pro-abortion crowd, numbering at least fifty persons, mainly women,
surrounded a table where two representatives of PLAGAL, the Pro-Life Alliance
of Gays and Lesbians, were greeting passersby at the festival.  The hecklers
shouted insults and tried forcibly to close down PLAGAL's exhibit, claiming
that pro- life gays had no right to be at Pride.

Philip Arcidi, President of PLAGAL, and James Geller, a PLAGAL member, were
handing out brochures, distributing surveys on lesbian and gay sentiments on
abortion, and spreading PLAGAL's pro-life message.   PLAGAL is an independent
alliance of over 400 lesbians and gay men from across the country who advance
the pro-life message within the lesbian and gay community.  

Mr. Arcidi and Mr. Geller remained calm and nonviolent while the agitators
obstructed the access of interested lesbians and gays to PLAGAL's table.
 When the crowd circled the table, sat on the table, tried to pull down
PLAGAL's banner, rolled up PLAGAL's rainbow flag, scattered PLAGAL's
brochures, and stole the completed surveys awaiting tabulation, Mr. Geller
asked the organizers of the festival to come over and protect his and Mr.
Arcidi's first amendment rights.  Later,  the festival organizers came to the
table with several police officers.  One of the police officers spoke to some
of the women shouting derogatory comments, and asked the women sitting on and
crowding around the PLAGAL table to move.

Mr. Arcidi and Mr. Geller explained that the agitators were obstructing their
freedom to speak about PLAGAL, blockading the table PLAGAL had registered and
paid for, and were damaging PLAGAL's property.  The police and festival
organizers told Mr. Arcidi and Mr. Geller that they should leave the festival
immediately because their safety could not be guaranteed. Michael Wasserman,
who managed the festival, said the same.  At this point, the crowd of
hecklers was continuing to grow and their shouts and curses showed no sign of
abating.  Mr. Arcidi and Mr. Geller acceded to the request of the police and
organizers and left under escort.]