My First Protest March

I made my way down into the huddled masses yesterday evening at 7:00 pm to join the Prop 8 protest march in West Hollywood. It was my first and an experience I am not soon to forget.

After a quick stop to see friends at Fiesta Cantina, my pal Essay and I began the 7 mile trek from San Vicente & Santa Monica to Hollywood & Highland and back! At first, I was a little disappointed with the whole thing. It seemed like some of the gays were just looking for an excuse to go drink early and some of the celebrities saw it as a photo opportunity. The chanting seemed a little strange to me too. We're in West Hollywood, land of all things fag-ulous! Why are we preaching to a choir?

My favorite moment was when I saw porn star Alessandro Del Toro, who seemed to have lost his shoes and was marching in the wrong direction. Keep marching, Alley!

But I understand, these are dark times and it's good to drink through them, all celebrities involved help a cause and regardless of where we're chanting at least it will be on the news for everyone to see that we're not going to stand for this. I get it, I get it.

Still... I kept thinking, if we're going to do this, can't we be loud in our own way? I mean, the chanting "What do we want? EQUAL RIGHTS! When do we want it? NOW!" certainly got the point across, but frankly, marching at night in front of a group of 15,000 people behind me with a poster in my hand, I wanted to start singing, "A new Argentina! The chains of the masses untied..." and began to imagine how amazing it would be (and dare I even say affective and beautiful?) had everyone joined in!

But then something really special happened that I'm very lucky to have been a part of.

Instead of continuing to march on the streets that had been blocked off for us, a group of a couple thousand that I happened to be in the middle of seemed to be turning around and suddenly going in a different direction. I told Essay I didn't understand why we were turning around and asked what was going on and why people were screaming to hurry!

He explained to me that it's not a protest if you're staying on a parade route. We were about to take over another street that wasn't prepared for us and that street turned out to be Sunset Blvd. where we literally ran out into the traffic and stopped it cold.

A good 50 cop cars pulled up and when they told us to move to the right, the more to the left we would move. If they tried to pull up in front of us to block us, we would go past them. They couldn't stop us and we were too close together for them to just start arresting random people. It was such an adrenaline rush, a high like none I've ever experienced except when acting and sometimes singing where you have a completely natural out of body experience. It made me realize the thing all of those highs have in common: Putting something -- be it the cause, the character, the song, the emotion, the story -- before yourself. I often lose touch with a lot of things that take me outside of myself and it was such a great reminder of how necessary those moments are in our lives where we don't care how we look or sound or what we're getting out of something. When you put your ego on the back burner and allow something else to take you over so completely... well, there's just no rush that comes close to it.

Not to mention it was the most exercise I've had in a year, mmkay? I'm sure that had something to do with my blood pumping as well! And how eye opening was that? That there are mornings I think I couldn't possibly find the werewithall to get on a treadmill, yet I managed to walk 7 miles! I'm clearly capable of more than I thought.

Once we reached Hollywood and Highland, we were given chalk by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and told that though we can't yet marry, in the meantime we were to write our own personal vows all over Hollywood Blvd.

I choose to write: "I VOW TO STOP HATE IN MY OWN BACKYARD!"

Because though there's a specific issue we're fighting for, we can never forget what we're fighting against and that is our mortal enemy: Hate. And as always, if you want to change the world, the first thing you do is change what's in the mirror. An act of war is an act of war. We can't all just say we're fighting against Hate and then when someone cuts us off in traffic, flip them the bird and scream, "You stupid fuck!" out the window or we're just as hypocritical as those hypocrites we are fighting against.

When going into war, it is best to have clean hands.