Conversations with anti-gay Denver Pride protesters

“Contrary to what you may hear, we don’t hate these people. We believe there is a Hell, and we don’t want anyone to go there.”

This was Ballantine’s fifth year protesting, and from a distance of more than four feet he seems as self-assured as Barack Obama on inauguration day; though up close I see muscles twitching all over his face and arms, visibly taxed by the experience of absorbing so much hatred.

Inevitably, while I’m talking with Ballantine, a woman approaches him, ready to get into it. I later learn this woman’s name is Jennie Tippett, and like the anti-gay protestors, she has a lot of experience with protests outside Planned Parenthood – only she’s typically on the other side of the argument (she explains her strategy as distracting protestors with debate long enough for the girls who require PP services to get inside).

“Why are you doing this?” she asks.

“Well, where else am I going to this large an audience of homosexuals?”

Fair point, I thought. With Denver hosting the seventh largest Pride Parade and the third largest PrideFest in the nation, from a purely marketing standpoint he’s right: this was the most effective way to reach his audience.

“The Center for Disease Control states that homosexual men don’t live as long as straight men,” Ballantine continued.

“But do you know what the largest demographic of HIV infected persons are?” Tippett asked. “It’s young, straight, African American women. And that’s because people like you create a culture where others cannot be honest about themselves, and they end up keeping quiet about things like their illnesses.”

Good one, I thought, holding my microphone between them. When I later listened to this recording I heard a plethora of conversations just like this going on in the background, angry voices shouting all around us. One woman pushing a child in a stroller down the parade was cursed by a protestor, asking her how she could call herself a mother when she brought a child to a disgusting festival of sex and debasement like this.

The mother responded by informing the man that by the time her daughter was an adult, all of the homophobic twits like him would be gone.

I felt ashamed at how much I was enjoying this; not the drama so much, but the rare sociological phenomenon of people from totally different cultural backgrounds, discussing sex in the middle of the street.

The reason these two factions can exist on complete opposite sides of an issue is because they rarely overlap. After this parade these protestors will go back to the suburbs and discuss what they saw with other fundamentalist Christians who believe exactly as they do; and the pro-gay contingent will go down to PrideFest in the park, and talk about the bigoted weirdoes who shouted at them from the sidewalk. But for one brief moment they coexisted inside the ven-diagram of conversation, nearly meeting each other on a human level.

“It’s funny,” said Tippett to Ballentine, “you think PrideFest is destructive, and I think what you’re doing is destructive.”

When I later asked Tippett the same question I’d been asking these protestors all day – if she thought she would change anyone’s mind – she literally gave me the exact same response the protestors did. “I don’t think I’m going to convince them, but hopefully you say something that makes them think.”

It’s no wonder that those enjoying Sunday’s Pride Parade would respond so viscerally to the protestors. For many of them this is the one day of the year where they can walk hand in hand with their partner, safe in the freedom that no one will shout “fag!” from a speeding pickup truck.

So it’s a transcendently ugly thing when a parade celebrating that which has for so long been subdued and confined (or, in some cases, permanently silenced) is punctuated by a team of bullies shouting anachronistic hatred, attempting to shove them back into the closet.

But once inside the mind of the protestor, you see that their motives are almost completely without malice. As misguided as they may be, they ultimately believe they are out to help people. From their interpretation of reality (mostly comprised of the bible and those in power who interpret the bible) gay sex leads to an eternity of suffering in the bowels of Hell. So, from that perspective, their actions make sense. They just want to help. It’s almost noble, considering the shit they take for it.

It would be like if a person with severe OCD warned you that turning on the lightswitch will give you cancer. You don’t get angry at this person, you pity them.

Yet I don’t want to overestimate the power of these anti-gay dissidents. While they did piss off some, many people saw them as a quaint joke, almost a caricature of a bygone era. Like a political piñata, many came by to shout the characteristic “fuck you!” or “focus on your own damn family!” empowered by the experience of bellowing a war-cry back at the homophobes, turning them into everyone who’d ever belittled them for being who they are. Some ran up to kiss Ken Scott on the cheek, grinning while having their picture taken next to him, like he was an exotic animal that had wandered too far from his natural habitat.

There were only about a dozen protestors at any given time, but there were always at least that many counter-protestors, hanging around, giving the churchies a hard time. Some cursed them aggressively, coming as near to violence as you can with words, while others held up satirical protest signs, making witty references to Crystal Pepsi, the Honey Badger, and all the weird shit we don’t follow from the Bible (such as bans on haircuts – declared in Leviticus only a few short passages from the line about not sticking it in the naughty place).

The only female protestor I encountered that day was an elderly woman holding a sign that read “I Care About You.” She wasn’t ready to give me her name, but she was more than willing to share the Good News with me, asking if my family supported my “homosexual lifestyle” (I refrained from telling the woman that I was currently in a relationship with a person of the opposite gender). When I got around to asking the main question, wanting to know how it felt to come out here, virtually alone, to deliver a message that these thousands of people will not only reject, but respond to with primal hatred, the old woman began to fall apart. “I hate this,” she said, her face twitching as she began to cry, “I hate being here. This is so hard. I really wish I didn’t have to do this.”