If you're the kind of person who right off the pillow asks yourself, "What happened to the American Left after the 1960s?" have I got a book for you. Because whether you love Trump or hate him, he is generating more juice for protest since his election than his predecessor did in eight years. Trump is asking for it, so why not give it to him? But first, familiarize yourself with Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism, published this month by Verso. Join the author at Writers With Drinks at the Make Out Room, on Saturday, March 11, at 7:30 p.m.
Writer and activist L.A. Kauffman, currently of Brooklyn, lived in the Bay Area in the late 80s and early 90s, after a BA at Princeton ("a horrible place to be a woman in the 80s") and high school in Milwaukee. "L.A." stands not for the town but her actual initials. We spoke over the phone for an energetic hour. The 52-year-old resisted my attempts to ferret out biographical tidbits, reflexively throwing focus to her subject. There's no first-person in the book, she pointed out, but she was present at much of the action she describes as a participant, a planner, or a journalist. The personal is still the political.
Kauffman's initiation in political protest came in 1981 via reproductive rights, in the bosom of the Milwaukee Chapter of the National Organization of Women (N.O.W.). A bit staid in retrospect, N.O.W. nonetheless was a place to mix with socialists and even lesbians. In college she worked on a range of issues. Her first real taste of direct action was the 1985 student occupation of Columbia University's Hamilton Hall in support of divestment from apartheid South Africa. The game-changer, though, was ACT-UP, because it was "compelling, visually bold, it broke with tired rhetoric, and got things done."
ACT-UP proved that "the key to being successful is to be willing to be unpopular, use disruptive and unruly tactics, and be criticized." In fact, throughout Direct Action , "queers are at the center of the story. I didn't set out to tell the queer and feminist history of activism, but it's the only way to faithfully tell the story." She writes, "Many movements contributed to this long process of political reinvention, but feminism and queer radicalism played special, central roles, profoundly redefining the practice of activism in ways that have too rarely been acknowledged."
Her five-page introduction cites Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s letter from Birmingham jail to elucidate her title. "Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored." Civil Rights protests are given their due as precursors to anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, and the book ends with a brief history of the recent movement organized against the shooting by cops of young black men.
The 200-plus-page book, including 30 pages of concise notes, is a lean, mean overview of direct action in the U.S. since the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War in 1971. The text is enlivened by several on-page photographs and an inspiring collection of rebellious logos. She writes that this is "a story rooted less in radicals' ideas about how the world ought to change than the evolving forms of action they've used to actually change it." You have to be an idealist to want to do this work, and a pragmatist to keep going. Kauffman says her pleasure in protest is "Winning! What it's possible to win and how."
The gender-non-conforming activist currently works on "a bunch of anti-Trump things, in an advisory role, because they need someone with lots of experience, who doesn't have time to do the nuts and bolts." Someone who's still upbeat after 35 years of resistance. "This is a story about dealing with defeat and marginalization, but its ultimate message �" for those who share the values of the movements profiled here �" is one of hope: no matter how long the odds, with smart organizing and the right tools, we can win more than we imagine."
The Make Out Room, 3225 22nd St., SF. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., event 7:30 p.m. All proceeds benefit the Center for Sex and Culture. $5-$20, no one turned away.