A PROTEST OVER WAR AND ANOTHER KIND OF PROTEST

On this day in 1969, two hundred and fifty thousand people including four aides of Richard Nixon 's White House protested the Vietnam War in Washington D.C. It was the largest single gathering of people for a specific protest in United States history.A vast throng of Americans, predominantly youthful and constituting the largest mass march in the nation's capital, demonstrated peacefully demanding a rapid withdrawal of United States troops from Vietnam.The District of Columbia Police Chief, Jerry Wilson, said a "moderate" estimate was that 250,000 had paraded on Pennsylvania Avenue and had attended an antiwar rally at the Washington Monument. Other city officials said aerial photographs would later show that the crowd had exceeded 300,000.Until this day long ago, the largest outpouring of demonstrators had been the gentle civil rights march of 1963, which attracted, 200,000. Observers of both marches said the throng that appeared today was clearly greater than the outpouring of 1963. And yesterday came another protest of a different kind-- a backlash against the passage of Proposition Eight that added fourteen words to the Constitution of the State of California. The protest was held at City Hall-- (the crowd was amazing) Those fourteen words ended the opportunity for those of us who are so proud to be gay the opportunity to marry our significant others. Of course the culprit in all of this are the Mormons. Their financial contributions attributed 70% of all the money (that's a lot) that the "Yes On Eight" collected. And they were NOT just Mormons from California, but from Utah. What in the hell gives anyone outside of California the right to contribute money for a California issue? Unfortunately, it will not just be the Mormons who will feel this backlash. It will be the entire state of Utah in one of the largest boycotts called for that i have ever heard of. The boycott will be against their tourism, skiing, products,even the Sundance Film Festival. So I can hear you saying "It's over-- why are you so upset-- drop it" Oh no you don't. The battle may have been lost, but the war rages on. As that wonderful quotation goes from Winston Churchill "They came for the Jews, and I wasn't Jewish, so I did nothing. Then the came for the Catholics, and I wasn't Catholic, so i did nothing. Then they came for the gypsies, and the artists, and I wasn't either one of those and again I did nothing. And then they came for ME, and I wasn't even sure why--but by then, it was just damn late." John Nugent and I went into Hollywood yesterday by train. It was where we saw all the protesters. You couldn't move in that train. There were more young people holding signs and banners. Funny thing, in the entire group of eighteen crowded in the single car of that train, not one of them was gay. "Wrong is wrong" they all said.

John and I had a nice lunch and went to Grauman's Chinese theatre and saw the strangest film I have seen in a long time. It was called "What Happens Next" and starred Robert Di Niro as a very strange Hollywood producer, John Lugano as a a desperate screenwriter with a vengeance, Sean Penn and Bruce Willis in the strangest role I have ever seen him play. Involved in the plot was a funeral of a young top Hollywood agent who had killed himself because he was married and had an affair with Di Niro's seventeen year old daughter. The funeral sequences were all filmed at Rose Hills where my friend Tim Doran works playing the organ for deceased clients. Not only in the main chapel called SkyRose but on their funeral grounds involving an open burial plot. Strange!!! I wonder if the Rose Hills people knew what these guys were filming. With an extraordinarily amount of bad language, things done in bad taste and disrespect, this picture is going nowhere. Big errors: In the movie, Bruce Willis (who plays himself, by the way) refuses to shave his fully developed beard even at the demand of the studio and its threat to cancel the movie and sue Willis. Willis goes really really amok when there is a confrontation. Trust me, I was an agent, no big star is going to risk the cancellation of a movie and a thirty million dollar law suit over a beard. The other funny thing is that the agent who comitts suicide is Jewish--funny thing his funeral is at least a week later. Sorry! Jews must be buried within twenty four hours because they can not be embalmed. People were walking out and there wasn't that many people in this theatre to begin with. Oh well, another movie bites the dust. Had it not been for all the respect I hold for Robert DiNiro, John and I would have walked out. We went over to the Virgin Megastore and noticed some really great musicals on DVD for only $10. So I picked up "Cabaret" and John picked up "Camelot."