Two Generations, One Movement
1.19.10 : USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

Roy Bateman is a 56-year-old gay man living in San Francisco, the Mecca of American social activism. He is about as socially conscious as they come, especially when it comes to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) causes.  And yet he said this past October’s National Equality March, which organizers say drew a crowd of 150,000 in support of LGBT equality, barely made his radar. How can this be?

In part, it may be because the march was largely the work of a new, younger generation of LGBT activists.  Jay Michaelson, executive director of Nehirim, a nonprofit organization that focuses on LGBT issues in the Jewish community, said that the march had a distinctly youthful quality. He compared the march’s organization to that of the Obama campaign. “There was a lot of use of social media and a lot of grassroots organizing, as a opposed to sort of a more top down approach,” he said. The march also had an anti-establishment bent. “There was a kind of useful rebellious energy that was at the march. And then the rhetoric that was used at the march, the way it was constructed, and even the idea of having a march at all, it wasn’t necessarily establishment politics,” said Michaelson.

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Blog of Samantha Hermann at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism