SF Pride leaders reject Bradley Manning
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On June 7 the San Francisco Pride Board issued a statement that it was refusing to back down from its decision to overrule the vote to select Bradley Manning as grand marshal for this year’s LGBT Pride Celebration. This was despite an angry May 31 community meeting at which many people had urged the board to re consider.
On April 26, former grand marshals of San Francisco Pride, meeting in the orga nization’s “Electoral College,” announced that Pfc. Manning had been selected as honorary grand marshal for the June 30 event. Manning is currently being pros ecuted by the U.S. military for disclosing information to WikiLeaks. The 82-yearold Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the “Pen tagon Papers” in the midst of the Vietnam War, planned to be the stand-in for Man ning in the parade.
Immediately, Lisa Williams, the presi dent of the San Francisco Pride Board, rescinded the decision and issued a state ment proclaiming that “Manning will not be a grand marshal in this year’s San 4 SOCIALIST ACTION JUNE 2013 Francisco Pride celebration.”
She called the Electoral College selection “a mistake.”
Referring to the alleged charg es against Manning, Williams said that the SF Pride leader ship would not tolerate “even the hint of support for actions which placed in harm’s way the lives of our men and women in uniform.” In making the statement, Wil liams chose to disregard the fact that investigations have shown that no members of the military were harmed by Manning’s ac tions.
A protest rally was called for the following evening at the office of the SF Pride Board. One of the organizers, Michael Petrelis, re ported on the event: “A big thank you to the 200-plus individuals who participated in our 90-min ute rally early this evening at the SF Pride office, on behalf of accused gay whistle-blower Bradley Manning. Not a single elected official, homosexual or straight, attended, and a rally without a (Above) S.F. chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War and Civilian-Soldier Alliance rally to demand that Bradley Manning be reinstated as grand marshall in the June 30 Pride celebration.
politician to suck up activist energy is a great rally! “The man who leaked the Pentagon Pa pers, Daniel Ellsberg, spoke to rousing cheers and announced he would attend SF Indymedia his first Pride March in June when he marches with the Bradley Man ning contingent. Our call-andresponse went like this: ‘They say court martial!’ ‘We say Grand Marshal!’ There was a strong les bian and women’s presence.”
Joey Cain, who had nominated Manning, explained, “He is an LGBT person who put his life on the line not only as a soldier but as a whistle blower, who exposed the lies of the U.S. military. He rep resents an aspect of the best of who we are as LGBT people.”
There have been rumblings in every city about Pride becoming a corporatized, assimilationist event. Even organizations like Gay Shame have been formed specifi cally to protest what they saw as Pride’s abandoning its original purpose.
Many people are amazed that an event that memorializes rebel lion, liberation, and celebration of community has become a tool of corporations. But this action of the San Francisco Pride Board seems like a turn ing point.
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Craig Lassig / AP