From theatrical protests to political action, read Edmonson's account of his time with Queer Nation Houston.
Collage by Molly Kyles. Read more about this image in the Gallery tab.
Who is Andrew Edmonson?
I'm Andrew Edmondson, I'm 54 years old, I work for the Museum of Fine Arts. I'm membership manager, I continue to be involved in gay activism, and to try to advance the equality agenda. I think that my experience with Queer Nation really taught me that direct action could have an tangible impact and it could make a difference. And that was incredibly empowering in a time that was incredibly frightening, when people were dying. There was a sense that you could take action and change things locally. Some of the friends I made during queer nation, I think you bonded by going through the stressful experiences together. And for me, it really helped me find a community of activists who cared about the kind of political and social justice issues that I cared about.
When did you become involved in gay activism?
The real turning point moment for me was [when] I was a senior in college, it was 1989. They had a display of the AIDS Memorial quilt in Washington, DC. I went to the display of the quilt, and there was someone who gave me a flyer about a speaker who was going to be talking at a rally. I went, and there were probably 100 people at the rally. The speaker was incredibly impassioned, [and] also incredibly angry. I still remember to this day that he said that he lived in New York, and he went to take the subway, and he was supposed to receive a discounted subway rate because he was a person with a disability. And they said, What's your disability? And he said, I'm living with AIDS, and they said, No, you're not if you were living with he would be dead. Only later that I found out he was a famous film critic named Vito Russo. He was very influential as a thinker. For me that humanized that discrimination. Someone would treat you with such contempt that they would deny the reality that you were living. I had these moments of epiphany, where you see how unjust American society can be. And sort of that was one of them. The quilt is not displayed as much anymore, but seeing it stretching across vast swathes of Washington, and realizing all these people have died, and each quilt panel represents a human life, and then to walk through and to see some incredibly touching beautiful panels that evoke so vividly the people who had died, that was really profoundly moving. And it sort of opens your emotional life in a way that it's not so much about abstract numbers of the number of dead, but you realize like, these are people's lives. And these are people who are under 30, who are dying and who didn't get to live half their life or 40 years of their life because of this disease. And our government doesn't seem to really care.
When did you become involved with Queer Nation?
The moment where I became involved with Queer Nation was another one of those epiphany moments. There was a young gay banker named Paul Broussard, and he was leaving a gay club called Heaven that was very popular. It was on July 4, 1990, and on his way home, he was attacked by high school students who driven in from Woodlands, Texas, specifically to find a fag to beat up, and he was murdered. I had gone out that same night, I had gone out to Heaven. I had walked home from Heaven because I lived in Montrose. I really had that moment of “there for the grace of God go I,” they could have killed me, I was just lucky enough not to be in the same place that he was. And I think that for a lot of gay people in Houston, that was a real turning point moment, because there was a sense that people could object to your lifestyle, people could think that homosexuality was wrong, but it seems like [Paul Broussard’s death] crystallized that, hey, they can kill you. And it doesn't matter. That germinated a sense of outrage, frankly. That took me to my first Queer Nation meeting.
There was a sense that bluntly, because it was the life of a gay man in Montrose, that the cops didn't care that much, and it wasn't really that serious and his life wasn't important because he was gay. I attended that coordination meeting, and people were like, we need to do a protest. And that was another turning point moment, because this was pre-Internet. There was no social media. They’d have what's called phone trees, where you'd call your friends and try to convince them to come to the protest, we would go out to the Montrose gay bar area and hand out flyers encouraging people to go to the protest. But the protest was scheduled at Texas Art Supply, which is sort of Montrose near West Grey. There were a lot of people who turned out. I've been in protests [where] we've got 25 people, and they care passionately, but we ended up having like 1,500 people who attended that march. I think it resonated with straight people in Montrose as well, that you shouldn't be killing people if you disagree with them. There was a protest that went to the center of Montrose and Westheimer; I don't think we had a permit for the protest. But what everybody did is they spontaneously stopped traffic at the center of Montrose and Westheimer, because there were so many people out in the center of the street. Suddenly, because you had this kind of major event with all these people, all four TV stations were covering the protests live, it was on the front page of the Houston Chronicle the next day. It really felt like in that moment we had focused attention on Paul Broussard’s death. It went from [seeming like] nobody cared to a huge event. There are people in the streets protesting and someone should pay attention, and something should be done about this injustice. I remember that moment feeling a sense of affirmation, feeling a sense of community, it's not just me and 20 other gay people, it's straight people [too]. There was an interesting news article that was done in the Houston Chronicle; there was a gay man who was sort of middle aged or older— and he was talking about basically he had lived with discrimination all [his] life, and you just sort of get used to it, and you accept it. But when they start killing you, that's the end of it, and this can't go on.
It really felt like, honestly, that that was sort of the gay version of Black Lives Matter, in 1990. There was this movement that sort of caught fire, and Queer Nation would do these really direct actions that were confrontational, and they were highly theatrical. And they were honestly pitched to get TV coverage, to keep putting gay issues of anti-gay violence, discrimination against people with HIV on TV and get people talking about it. It was also a controversial movement. There were gay people who felt like Queer Nation gave the LGBTQ community a bad name. They felt like the name queer, which had been used as a derogatory phrase for gay people for decades, was incredibly inappropriate and that we should never call ourselves that.
I remember there was a protest against the foodstore Randall’s — they had fired a butcher, who worked in their butcher department, who was HIV positive and then developed AIDS. We probably had 60 to 80 people, we went into the grocery store, and put it on the six o'clock news. And so suddenly, people were talking about the fact that people who were living with HIV were being discriminated against, and that this was unjust.
I remember in the 1980s, I grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, it's probably 18. And there was a Newsweek magazine. And in the 1980s, there were two major weekly news publications, Time and Newsweek. And on the cover of Newsweek, they had a story about the AIDS crisis. The reason why it caught my attention was there was a cover image of two men. I think that they were partners, and one was holding the other man. And I knew that I was gay, but hadn't yet kind of processed that and come out. And I remember reading that article, and it being affirming in some ways, because I saw a representation of gay people. The article focus was mainly the gay communities really rising to this incredible challenge. The community has been devastated, but they're rallying together to care for people who are sick and who are dying. Sometimes you can have in the 1980s, incredibly homophobic portraits of the gay community, but this was actually quite positive. That kind of opened my eyes and kind of educated me about AIDS.
I lived in London, I graduated from college and lived in London from 1989 to 1990. And I met a gay man and he his early 40s, he was very welcome to me and kind of a mentor. And his partner had HIV that later developed to AIDS. He cared for his partner. His partner began to seriously decline after I had left London. But that was the first exposure of someone who was not in the media who was in my personal life, who I knew and who I cared about, having HIV and just seeing how that impacted a relationship, and how that changed their lives.
When I came to Houston, what was interesting is, I was originally drawn to Queer Nation because I was so angry about the level of anti-gay violence. Queer Nation started doing these direct action protests, there started to be more coverage in the media about hate crimes, all types of hate crimes, including hate crimes of racially motivated by racial bias. And the Houston Police Department did an operation called vice versa. And that was an undercover operation where a police officers pretended to be gay men, and they would go to Montrose, and they would hold hands and walk down the street. It was an attempt to sort of study if there are anti-gay bias incidents occurring. And within a week, they had to call off operation vice versa, because the level of violence that the police officers experienced was so overwhelming, that it became immediately clear that yes, there is an extreme level of anti gay violence. That study prompted a columnist in the New York Times to write about operation vice versa. And what it had revealed and the fact that America had a real problem with bias crimes and with prejudice against gay people and prejudice against minority groups. It felt like in Queer Nation that when you did these actions, and you dramatize what was happening, that you were in some ways contributing to the national conversation.
So looking back in retrospect, maybe we could have been more solicitous to trying to seek input from different ethnic communities in Houston. But it sort of felt like coronation was one of those things like the meetings were Tuesday night at seven o'clock at the Montrose activity center. And if you were interested, you went and you told your friends and you went with your group of friends. And it was just sort of this viral movement of people talking to people. So it didn't feel like some organizations where maybe you had a deliberate outreach strategy, and there was a membership.Queer Nation was just very not at all structured.
Who were like, the biggest opposition to Queer Nation?
Honestly, it felt to me like conservative Republican Party.
Sometimes it felt like the police didn't care whether gay people were beaten up, or murdered. In the early 90s, there were a series of assaults and then there were like three or four murders. There was a real sense by that kind of third or fourth murder of, what the hell are the police doing? Why are they not doing more to stop this from happening? That led to a sense that the police didn't value queer lives.