Full Court Press

Full Court Press
The 1987 MOW Supreme Court Disobedience

By eight o'clock on the morning of the Supreme Court civil disobedience, the Radical Faeries and their friends had already been communing on the East Lawn of the Capitol for more than half an hour. The Faerie circle expanded as more protesters arrived, joined hands, and were linked to the group by an intricate black-and-white-yarn net that wound around, across, and through the circle. Slowly, sonorously, a chant began, "We are the flow, we are the ebb. We are the weavers, we are the web."

At first more of a low resonance carried along by the bass and tenor voices, the song grew louder and more certain as others joined in, bodies swaying gently. Someone came and cut the yarn that tied the circle together. The black-and-white web in the center fell away.

Almost of its own accord, the circle began a slow, clockwise revolution; then arcs of it split off and wove themselves among one another. The movement within the serpentine line was sometimes solemn and cadenced; at other times, a giddy and nearly chaotic game of crack-the-whip.

Through the trees lining First Street, the steps of the supreme Court building were clearly visible and, at their crest, the baby-blue police barricades and the lines of helmeted officers arranging themselves behind them. On the lawn an enormous, anticipatory crowd had gathered. "When are we going over?" people whispered to one another. "Has the first wave been arrested yet?"

But the organizers of the civil disobedience were in no hurry. Once arrests began, they knew, the action would evolve at the leisure of the police. For these last moments, then, they were taking their own time.

There were a few final pep talks; a few cheers; a few tears as the "People With AIDS and Their Friends" affinity group received a standing ovation from a crowd that thundered, "Cure AIDS now!"

The leader of the PWA affinity group raised his right fist in a return salute. As he did, the left arm of the grinning woman beside him went up as well; the handcuffs that joined their wrists gleamed gunmetal and chrome in the morning sun.

Meanwhile, only steps away, the official civil disobedience press conference was beginning. When the formal introduction to the media ended, shouts rang out from several directions at once: "Tell them how many of us there really were on Sunday!" (The New York Times, among other major newspapers, had accepted a Park Service estimate that the October 11th march and rally had drawn only about 200,000.) The announcer took the microphone: "I've been asked to inform you that between 500,000 and 750,000 gay men and women marched on Washington this Sunday." There were whoops, gasps, and applause. Then the chant went up, "Almost a million' Almost a million!"

We had scarcely recovered from the heady recognition of our own numbers, of our own power and, as that recognition began to blossom into action, it was time to storm the Supreme Court. For a people who often felt invisible, tyrannized by the majority, Sunday's march had been a victory mostly of presence. What that presence brought to Washington was political; what it gave to lesbians and gay men was pure nourishment. If, by Tuesday morning, the world seemed a place richer in possibility, the hundreds who crossed First Street knew well that the power to foreclose on those possibilities continued to reside elsewhere.

Beneath the famous promise carved into marble "Equal Justice Under the Law," they stood up, sat down, bellowed slogans, and insisted that it wasn't necessarily so.

Here are some statistics to provide a framework for an event whose historical significance may take years to measures. More than 4,000 lesbians, gay men, and their friends gathered at the Supreme Court building on Tuesday morning to protest the Hardwick sodomy decision, the "Gay Olympics" decision, and the oppression of gay and lesbian people generally. By the end of the rally, over 650 people had been arrested. It was the largest number of arrests at a demonstration in Washington since 1972, the largest ever at the Supreme Court. The police, many of whom had barely teenagers fifteen years before, had little idea what to expect. When the demonstration began, four buses had been provided to carry protesters to jail. By day's end, the police needed a total of 17.

Indeed, as the line of officers stood at the top of the Supreme Court steps, they had the clearest view of the roaring masses that surrounded them, that outnumbered them by at least 15 to 1. They may have been frightened, as their latex gloves and riot gear suggested; perhaps they were as frightened as some of the gay men and women who stood across the street from them, waiting to turn themselves over to a system whose mercy could not be counted on. As someone had noted at Monday's pre-action meeting, "If this government is willing to drive a train over Brian Wilson's legs, we shouldn't kid ourselves about what they might do to a bunch of dykes and fags."

As the action began, affinity groups swept in organized waves across First Street, over the sidewalk, and onto the Supreme Court steps. Supporters whooped their encouragement from the sidelines, buoying each group along on their cries of "Go! Go! Go! Go!"

But the police were excruciatingly slow to begin arrests. Perhaps they hoped the waiting would dampen demonstrators' spirits but, if anything, the effect was the reverse. Instead, the wit, irony, and angry conviction of the lesbian and gay community found a voice of unflagging vigor: "No testing! No quarantine! Silence equals death!"; "Faggots and fairies and dykes! Oh, my!"; "Test drugs, not people!"; "We are everywhere and we will be heard."

As a women-only wave moved to occupy a section of the steps, the shout went up, "We like dykes!" Once in place, the women modified a familiar rally cry and began a chant of their own: "The women, united, will always be excited!" At times the police themselves became the subject of gibes: "Ten percent of you are gay!" went one; and another, "Two, four, six, eight. How do you know your wives are straight?" As the hours wore on, and the arrest process seemed hopelessly delayed, the cheers turned plaintive, "We're tired. We're bored. We want to go to jail!"

And go to jail they did. As busloads of arrestees were driven a away, the boisterous thousands chorused after them, "You're in because you're out! We're here because we're queer!"

For the rest of the long afternoon and well into the evening, police accepted $100 fines from the disobedients and released them by ones and twos. Those who chose not to be released in this way were left to await arraignment. What quickly became clear was that the District had made no arrangements for extra judges or special courtrooms; arraignments would not start until nearly 9:00 p.m. "Good Lord," grumbled one of the volunteer attorneys monitoring the action, "it's not as though they didn't know we were coming.”

At D.C. Superior Court, nearly 300 prisoners awaited their opportunity to plead guilty or not guilty to the charge of unlawfully "parading and assembling" at the Supreme Court. Until well after 2:00 a.m. the justice system ground inexorably onward, at times taking on the trappings of absurdist theater: Macho, swaggering deputies patrolled the courtrooms, snapping at stone-butch lesbians to "sit up straight in this court of law"; magistrates formally admonished the hundreds who packed the galleries, many of whom waved and clapped as bailiffs led their friends into court, against being "demonstrative."

At her arraignment one woman announced, "I plead guilty to being a lesbian, your honor. It's something I've dreamed of being guilty of all my life." Another arrestee, his eyes red-rimmed with exhaustion, told the judge, "I'm proud to be guilty, proud to be weak before this system that oppresses us."

In the end, most of the remaining defendants pled guilty, paid the $50.00 judgment, and were released. A few, refusing to pay money into the penal system, chose the alternate sentence of three days in jail. Given credit for Tuesday's incarceration, the last of the disobedients was released on Thursday evening.

Throughout Tuesday's six-hour rally, protesters dropped bags and handfuls of pink triangles, cut from construction paper, onto the Supreme Court steps. It was only a gesture. By evening, long after the crowds were gone and the last of the protesters had been arrested, pink triangles still littered the steps and sidewalk. Blown by the wind into drifts, fluttering along where thousands had shouted, sung, and wept, they were the distillation of the disenchanted voices of morning, a final chorus of dissent in the failing light.