Messages Mixed and Masked

Counter-protests and police encounters at the (so-called) “Straight Pride” parade

text and photos by Judith Donath

The parade had been short. Unlike the Gay Pride Parade three months earlier, when hundreds of thousands of people cheered a two mile long parade of mostly local groups, the so-called “Straight Pride” parade was able to muster only about 200 marchers, mostly from out of town.

By the time I arrived, the brief parade was already over. A long line of police in full riot gear — heavy black vest, helmets, thick gloves — were walking away, pulling off their hot helmets in the bright sunshine. Perhaps they were just taking a break: the post-parade rally was setting up at City Hall plaza.

At first glance, one might think “Straight Pride” parade was innocuous. Its website touts values such as “respect, inclusivity, equality” and its racially diverse line-up of speakers included several women.

Yet, even at its face value — as a response to the Gay Pride celebrations — the Straight Pride rally was at best problematic. John Hugo, the main organizer, said “Straight people are an oppressed majority. We will fight for the right of straights everywhere to express pride in themselves without fear of judgement and hate. The day will come when straights will finally be included as equals among all of the other orientations.” Or, as a retired trucker who had driven in from New Jersey for the march said to the Boston Globe, “‘They’ve got gay everything, every place, and it’s about time they did something for straight pride. We’re people, too.’”

Gay Pride celebrates the recent and still far-from-certain social and legal acceptance of a range of genders and sexual preferences, after a terrible history of stigma and often violent repression. It is hard to not see homophobia in claiming to be victimized by that commemoration.

But self-righteous, or even self-parodying, homophobia was only a veneer on something darker. The organizers, a group calling itself “Super Happy Fun America” have ties to far-right and white supremacist groups. Their security was handled by John Camden, founder of The American Guard, which Anti-Defamation League has described as a hardcore racist group associated with anti-immigrant extremism, hatred, and violence. And, to erase any doubt that pride in straightness was not, in fact, their point, the parade’s Grand Marshall and featured speaker was Milo Yiannopoulos, the gay alt-right provocateur who has made himself unwelcome, for reasons ranging from inciting violence to promoting pedophilia, at Facebook, Twitter, Breitbart and the entire continent of Australia.

“We heard the outrage online,” said Clayton Cresswell, a grown man who dressed as Pepe the Frog in a clown wig for the event. “We thought this was a good time to stick it to the collectivist, idealist identitarian left.” — Buzzfeed News.

Trolling has a long online history, dating back to pre-Web Usenet. The troll pretends to be an earnest member of the community, but, with faux naivete, says increasingly offensive things, with the goal of sparking so much confusion and outrage that all discussion is entirely derailed.

The Straight Pride parade was a real-life, major-city-scale troll.

Barricades surrounded City Hall plaza, where the post-parade rally was to take place. The gatekeeper, a woman draped in an Israeli flag, allowed only those whom she deemed indisputably right wing to enter. Some gained access by intoning “ברוך אתה השם”, the opening line of Hebrew prayers.

I’m Jewish and have long associated Judaism with support for the oppressed — and with a deep-seated anti-fascist instinct. I know that reality has always been more complicated and that many American Jews voted for Trump because of his support for Israel, but I was still shaken by this overtly Jewish participation in an event with close ties to white supremacists and anti-Semitic hate groups. What were they trying to say, marching along with Milo Yiannopoulos and Pepe the Frog ? Were they serious? Were they actually Jewish or a part of the mocking theatrics? Was their prominent presence intended to provoke anti-Semitic responses from the demonstrators?

The protestors, hundreds of them, were gathered on Congress Street, in front of the Holocaust Memorial. LGBTQ rainbows mixed brightly against the black antifa bandanas, sometimes on the same person.

Squeezed between the Brutalist architecture of City Hall Plaza and the glass towers of Boston’s Holocaust Memorial was a veritable semiotic carnival. There were bandanas with the anarchist circle-A, horse masks, dog masks, and a Lucha Libre wrestling mask. There were, I was relieved to see, protestors wearing yarmulkes and stars of David. One T-shirt bore the revolutionary initials EZLN, another displayed the reclaimed Nazi pink triangle with the text “My sexual preference is probably not you”.

The Internet has generated an immense and diverse population of memes and symbols, some of which had escaped the confines of the screen and materialized there on Congress Street, from squishy soft emoji cat Pushteen, here with rainbow wings, to the headless-man flag of Anonymous, the uncharacteristically ethical 4-chan-based activist group.

The several hundred or more protestors — far more than there were Straight Pride rally-goers — were loud. They chanted “Nazis go home! Nazis go home” and “Boston hates you Boston hates you”; they drowned out the sound of the rally speakers with shrieking kazoos. Protest-goers more experienced than I wore earplugs.

Some chants were directed against the police. “Bottoms and tops, we all hate cops!” To me, this seemed misdirected — there was a reprehensible group of alt-right hate-mongers on which to focus anger — and un-strategic. The police just seemed to be doing their job. Yes, there were a huge number of them, disproportionate to the scale of the event they were overseeing. A protestor I spoke with argued that the police should not be protecting fascists; I replied that once the Straight Pride group had gotten permission to hold the rally it was right for them to be protected. That, he said, is how fascism spreads, protected by armed police who are on their side.

Two years earlier, I had been at a similar protest. In August 2017, a right-wing group had been granted permission to hold a “free speech” rally in Boston, and there was considerable tension and anxiety about what might happen. Only a week earlier, in Charlottesville, VA, a white supremacist rally-goer deliberately ran over and killed a woman in the aftermath of violent clashes between attendees of and protestors against the overtly racist and anti-Semitic “Unite the Right” gathering . Fortunately, the 2017 Boston event was starkly different. With the notoriety of the Charlottesville event still fresh, many planned right-wing speakers chose not to attend and only about 100 people showed up for the rally. They were met with 40,000 protestors; Boston deployed 500 police to keep the groups separate. Even though the police faced some harassment from the protesting crowd, including having a bottle of urine thrown at them, they kept the peace, arrested those causing trouble and both ensured the safety of the right-wing rally-goers and facilitated the protestors’ march and gathering. Then-Police Commissioner William Evans said “Overall everyone did a good job. 99.9 percent of people were here for the right reason, and that’s to fight bigotry.”

My impression from that event, as well as the larger but less tense Women’s March and the giant 2019 Gay Pride parade, was that the Boston Police force was, as it claimed, a community-focused protective organization, dedicated to serving everyone in its jurisdiction. I assumed that the Straight Pride protest would unfold similarly.

At 4:15 I decided to head home. The rally was over and and the protest crowd was thinning out; tourists in summery shorts and sun-dresses were wandering over from Haymarket. I turned to head up Congress Street when suddenly a formation of motorcycle police roared around the corner, followed by a larger group of cops on bicycles. Spread across the street, they headed straight for the remaining gathering of protestors.

Normally, the police ask a group to disperse, the warning to “Clear the street” amplified by bullhorn. Normally, their goal would be to end the gathering and open the street with as little trouble as possible.

But here there was no such warning, no minimal nod to the procedures of de-escalation. The police moved immediately to confrontation.

People had been milling about in the street before the police arrived and it was unclear where they wanted everyone to go. Several protestors, prepared for non-violent resistance, stood still and faced the police. One sat cross-legged in the middle of the street with her hands behind her head. Within a minute, she was arrested, her hands zip-tied behind her back.

The police singled out other protestors, pulling them from the crowd and throwing them on the ground — a medic, another woman. I saw the police spray something into the crowd; it was pepper spray and other videos show it was used multiple times at close ranges.

I am not tall, so what I could see was limited. I do know, though, there was no warning, no instructions given to the crowd. I also know that there was no tension brewing when the police arrived— quite the opposite. And I know that police came in quickly and very aggressively. Their intention, it seemed, was not to open the street, but to antagonize and make arrests.

The question I would like to understand is why? This was not a spontaneous action — judging by the way they arrived in formation and began making arrests with no announced warning, this was a planned strategy of escalation, designed to send a message. But what message? And meant for whom?

An obvious explanation is that the the message was “stay out of Boston” and it was meant particularly for the antifa protestors. Like most right wing press, the local conservative media — and the Boston Police Patrolman’s Association (BPPA)’s own newsletter — portray antifa as violent, trouble-making outsiders invading their town. President Trump has recently threatened to name it a domestic terrorist group.

Such a message is problematic. The duty of the police is to uphold the law fairly; to, in the words of the current Police Commissioner, “protect the freedoms and rights of all people, regardless of political leanings or personal points of view, to lawfully and peacefully express their First Amendment Rights.”

If anti-fascists were actually dangerous extremists, the actions of the police might be defensible. But antifa, and left-wing groups in general, are far less dangerous that the extreme right. The Anti-Defamation League notes that in the US, almost all killings by extremists have been by right-wing extremists; of the relatively few left-wing ones, almost all have been by black nationalist groups — there have been no killings in the US linked to antifa. Outside of the United States, antifa is perceived far more positively. For Europeans opposed to the far right, anti-fascism and opposition to neo-nazis, white supremacists, etc. is an unambiguously admirable stance.

Finally, as a message to “stay out of Boston”, the confrontational arrests were likely ineffective. Instead, they reinforced antifa’s message that the police are biased, violent, and on the side of the alt-right. (Note also that many of the arrested were members of the press and protestors unaffiliated with antifa).

There was, I think, another message embedded in that late-afternoon police assault.

There were an enormous number of police at the event — Boston police and also many from neighboring communities as well as the State police. They wore helmets and riot gear and they massively outnumbered the Straight Pride marchers , and possibly the protesters; I believe were more than had been at the much bigger 2017 Unite the Right rally. It was a huge, and hugely expensive, display. At 4pm, when the rally ended, they had broken up a couple of fights and made a few arrests; it had not been a totally peaceful day, but certainly nothing extraordinary. Did they need to demonstrate that such force had been necessary? Were the late afternoon provoked arrests made in order to send a message to the government administration saying that the vast police presence and aggressive tactics were appropriate and necessary?

This message seems to have reached it mark. Questioned about scale of the police presence at this event, Mayor Walsh’s response was “we needed it Saturday”. The police succeeded in using the arrests that they themselves provoked to justify their vast presence and their aggressive tactics.

Militarization of the police makes them more violent. In a destructive and at times deadly cycle, these violent encounters increase their demand for more equipment and policies that allow for harsher action. As city councilor Michele Wu noted: “ Having that many officers from all across the region, including paramilitary units from outside Boston, set a tone of tension/conflict for civilians AND fellow law enforcement. We need to understand how that decision was made, especially bc 2020 won’t be the quietest of years” .

The trolls had done what trolls do: sowing ire and confusion until everyone around them was fighting with each other.

The story did not end quite there. The Suffolk Country District Attorneys office decided to pursue only the more serious cases and to dismiss the people charged with minor offenses — but the judge refused. The next day, when a defense lawyer argued that he had no right to do so and attempted to read the relevant case law, he had her handcuffed and jailed for contempt. On Sept 9,A Massachusetts Supreme Court justice has ruled that the judge had no right to demand the attorneys pursue a case, that doing so violated the separation of power between judiciary and executive branches, and that for 200 years it has been the the sole authority of the prosecutor to decide which cases to prosecute.