As most people who know me know, I am not hugely fond of crowd scenes.  Which is not to say I'm agoraphobic. I can go to malls and walk down city streets without event.  I can go to movies and concerts and football games.  Dinner parties and discos.  But there is something about public protests that makes me nervous. 

I want to be very clear:  I think it's important for people to gather publicly to raise their voices together in protest when there's something going on that's not right.  All I'm saying is that personally I'm not quite comfortable in the midst of it.  It has not stopped me from participating in my fair share, but it's not a favorite pastime. 

It may be that, unlike all those other kinds of crowds, which still allow you your critical distance and leave your selfhood intact, the point of public protest is to amass.  There is a direct correlation between the size of the crowd and whether anyone pays attention to it, and then how much attention they pay.  I mean, just ask the guy with the evil sodomites poster in the picture above.

The point of public protest is precisely to get as many people as possible together in one place to speak as loudly as possible in one voice, and I can appreciate that, even while it combines several of my biggest peeves.  I'm banging on like this because in the end I walked away feeling very much apart from yesterday's proceedings while feeling very much a part of what they were about. 

I might have been more at ease with this crowd at yesterday's Prop 8 protest had I been able to wrangle up a little crowd of my own to come along.  I called half a dozen friends, but everyone had other plans (one death in the family, one booty call, two have-to-do-my-hairs, and two watching Project Runway reruns). 

Some couldn't exactly see the point of protesting Prop 8, and not the passage of anti-marriage equality measures in Florida and Arizona, and/or didn't really see themselves as the kinds of gays who go to gay rallies where they don't throw pooka beeds and free condoms into the crowd and there are probably not going to be circuit boys in speedos or drag queens on stilts (and for the record, there weren't).

One of the friends I invited along even went so far as to caution me against going alone. 

"It doesn't matter whether it's a gay club or a protest rally," he told me.  "If you're alone, you're toxic."

Well, that's never stopped me before.  Plus, I had my new Aviators I wanted to take for a test flight.  So that settled it.  I took the T on down to Government Center. 

The crowd was diverse for Boston.  Which is to say, if not as multicultural as we'd like, at least it was distinctly multi-something.  -Faceted.  -Tasking.  -Propertied.  It was multi-generational in this instance. 

The first speaker onstage was a college kid, from California I gathered, who was flanked on all sides by others who were there to demonstrate that the people impacted by Prop 8 were just as diversified. 

He began by saying, "A few days ago I was just a student..." The second half of the phrase was something like, "but now I'm an angry gay student who can't get married in California."  But before he finished it he passed around the mike for the others to say what they had been before the passage of Prop 8, and it went something like this:

"A student."

"A student."

"A graduate student."

"A student."

"An academic counselor."

"A student."

"A student."

"A financial aid adviser."

"A student."

As if any more proof were needed that, alas, gone are the days of "an Indian chief," "a cop," "a construction worker," "a stripper," and "a barfly."  We've come a long way, baby.

When the mike got back to the first student he wondered aloud if this protest wouldn't turn into some kind of a movement.  A gay movement?  Now there's an idea!

Ah, youth!  Always dreaming the impossible dream.  No biggie.  But it's a little like "discovering" a continent, as if it didn't exist before you touched down on its shores.  At least they weren't handing out plague-infested blankets.

Thankfully, a little later, someone's granny got up there and rocked the mike.  She alluded to Stonewall, that quaint old riot that took place a couple weeks before the first man landed on the moon back in the Nixon era.  It's good to be reminded occasionally that we are actually the beneficiaries of a long and storied civil rights movement. 

The students had also made a number of plugs for the organization — the English-as-a-Second-Language-sounding Join the Impact (whatever happened to catchy acronyms? — how about Join the Impact to Secure Marriage?) — that had organized worldwide protests using web 2.0 tools, and yadda yadda yadda.  Gay flashmobs were assembling in cities across the nation and around the globe (though, speaking of The Globe, the gathering garnered only the briefest of mentions in today's).  But again, while the web certainly facilitates rapid organizing, organizing tools themselves don't make a movement.  It apparently takes a dozen or so students, too.

I don't want to be too hard on the kids.  Their enthusiasm is future of the movement they're joining.  And it was good to see them validating our existence by discovering us.

I left before the proceedings were too far along, feeling alone and a little toxic, truth be known.  Walking on the outskirts of the crowd I thought of what my friend had said about gay clubs and protest rallies, and I remembered one long-ago night at one of those clubs on Lansdowne Street.  It was gay night and the dance floor was packed with squeaky clean shirtless Southenders.  From the outside it looked like a sea of blinding white bodies bobbing in unison to the techno beat.  But down in it, you could see all these impenetrable cliques, and how viciously they defended their little territory on the floor.  One guy I ended up dancing with bumped into a circuit bot one too many times, and the latter finally whipped around and hissed "stop touching me!"

As long as you don't have unreasonable expectations for crowds, you can appreciate their effectiveness in certain situations.  I certainly hope that yesterday's protest will be effective in helping bring marriage equality back to California, another step in the long and storied movement towards a more civil society.  And that despite my discomfort, being in that crowd (however alone it may have felt to me) will have contributed.