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EqualityCamp—held January 3rd in San Francisco--was a pilot event to bring Web 2.0 geeks who know the lessons of the Web well together with activists for marriage equality and equal rights for gays.
So, if you’re straight, do you care about marriage equality? Do you want the gay and lesbian couples you know to be able to make the same civil, legal commitment to get married that straight, heterosexual couples can? Or are you afraid supporting marriage equality will lead to marrying too many same sex couples in your church, or a general decline in cultural values?
If you’re not straight, are you a woman who can't marry her partner because you both share a specific sex/gender, or a trans-person who cannot marry as the gender you really are, as opposed to what you were born with?
These were moot questions in the Bay area for a while, as California law loosened up and allowed same-sex couples to marry, but with the passage of Prop 8, all that stopped. You see, the new law changes the California state constitution to restrict the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman—eliminating gay marriage. This means that my friends who are gay can no longer make the same legal commitments to one another that heterosexuals can, and that if I fell in love with a woman and wanted to marry her, I couldn’t. Furthermore, this was a law that—with all the activism going on to support its defeat—many people thought would not pass.
But pass it they did, so now the discussion in California has become “What’s next?”
Believing that "the No on 8 crowd didn't take advantage of the online/grassroots world, and they didn't show the face of gays,” some folks came up with another idea—to apply the Bar Camp principles of an open, day long un-conference to marriage equality activism and organizing and do a one day event to plan next steps to change. Social media and product folk Cathy Brooks, Tara Hunt, Adina Levin, Hillary Hartley and Heather Gold banded together with sponsors, friends and supporters to plan a put on EqualityCamp SF on January 3rd, perhaps the first BarCamp specifically devoted to a social/political issue.
So this past Saturday morning at 8:30, I finished walking the dog, grabbed my computer, got in the car and drove across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco to take part in the first Equality Camp. I went because it seems to me that being able to marry whomever you want to (assuming you are an adult) is a basic human right, and, since I had not been involved in organizing against 8 before, the time was right.
Inside the loading dock space at the CitizenSpace building, 75+ people were milling around, drinking coffee as the organizers simultaneously checked people in, handed out t-shirts, posed for photos and made sure the sticky notes, pens and scratch pads were out. By 10:30, the un conference planning was happening and by 11:15, the first set of 20 (simultaneous) sessions was underway (see schedule here).
The first two questions everyone was asked were “Why are you here?” and “What would you like to see happen?” What we learned from the answers was that the group was a mix of straight, bi-, queer and gay, with people coming from as far south as San Diego and as far north/east as Sacramento who all felt strongly that marriage equality—or gay marriage, as some put it, was a fundamental right Americans had to claim/reclaim.
One woman made much of her value as a straight(and married) supporter of what she saw as a primarily gay issue; many others describe themselves as present because they thought civil marriage was a right for all (I fall into that camp), still others shared their personal experiences around marrying their partner (or not, and supporting marriage equality anyway.) The crowd was impressive in its diversity-- Though there were (way) fewer people of color than one might hope, there were many people from the tech community who had never been involved in any marriage equality political actions before (again, I fell into that camp).
I was thrilled to see David Hornik, Tantek Celik, Shannon Clark, Melissa Gira and Chris Heuer (who was photographing)among the Bay area progressive tech/media folk who showed up
