Saturday morning, around twenty fabulously decorated queers and allies booty-danced toward the entrance of the Common Ground country fair in Unity, Maine. For the last twenty some years, fair-goers have been exposed to offensive images of bloody fetuses, as well as messaging that wrongfully appropriates social justice language like "domestic violence starts in the womb," by members of the Christian Civic League.
This year Naughty North and the MiMi Collective, a radical feminist reproductive health collective, decided it was time to take them on with some queer flair and a rad dance party!
At around 10:30am, after suiting up in our dance attire, we marched to the fair holding banners that read "WARNING: Crazy Christians Ahead," "Queers for Reproductive Rights," and "You Can't Control my Cooch," sashaying down the shoulder to our portable dance beats. Folks driving by were honking and sharing their approval before we even arrived at the scene. Once we descended upon the five Christian's and their anti-choice posters, their dismal scene turned into a raging party!
For the next hour, we shook it strategically in front of their signs, alerted fair-goers to their presence, and got most people who were stuck in the traffic at the gate into a much better mood.
The CCL folks were not quite so pleased. One booty shaker managed to herd a CC leaguer back to his car; others enjoyed making out in front of those who weren't so quick to take down their offensive propaganda. Some condoms unexplicably ended up in a CCL car. Some CCLers attempted to insult and argue with the dance partiers, but we were having way too much fun to engage in such fruitless debate.
Toward the end of the hour, the cops arrived after a complaint had been made from a CCLer about falling down signs. The cops attempted to separate the CCL folks from the naughty north and mimi folks, but couldn't come up with a real reason why they could ask us to move but not those holding up huge pictures of mutilated fetuses. After a fair amount of good cop/bad cop ungrounded harassment and threats, the conflict dissolved when most of us decided to follow the original plan and leave the CCLers to their beat-less boredom while we went and enjoyed the fair. Countless folks approached us and expressed their gratitude for our action--all agreed, it was way over due. Til next year!
more photos to come!!!
2 comments:
You guys were awesome! I wish you could have partied there all day (not that I'd want to stay near those Crazy Christians for long myself...).
An idea for future Common Ground Fairs- why don't we get some people to stop traffic a little before the Crazy Christians? They could keep a gap between the entrance to the fair and the Crazy Christians and then let each car through one at a time. That way those who would like to drive by them slowly (perhaps while flipping the bird, providing commentary, etc.) could do so, and those of us with small children in the car could zip by quickly (also flipping the bird)... Just a thought.
Thanks for the service!
I had a long, hard laugh at these videos. thank you.
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