Yesterday's demonstration at San Francisco's City Hall underscored my awareness of how atrophied my political activism had become during the Bush administration. It felt good to feel myself return to form. Jesse McKinley offers an inspiring overview of the national protest for The New York Times. Not wanting to stop there, however, I sought out something else I might do to further this fight within my existing interests and volunteered for the "No Milk For Cinemark Theatres" campaign, which I felt could be an effective strategy to ameliorate the less-focused animosity towards the Sundance Film Festival.As Dave Poland reported at The Hot Blog, John Aravosis chased down another significant "Yes on Prop 8" financial supporter: Alan Stock, the CEO of the Cinemark theater chain, who donated $9,999 to the Yes on 8 Campaign. The reasoning behind the "No Milk for Cinemark Theatres" campaign is that if 1,000 individuals commit themselves to see Milk at a competitor's theatre instead of Cinemark, at an average cost of $10 a ticket, that will result in $10,000 of lost revenue. Hopefully, the numbers will be even higher than that.
Here in the San Francisco Bay Area the Cinemark Theatres to avoid are:
Corte Madera—Century Cinema (41 Tamal Vista Blvd.)
Daly City—Century 20 Daly City (1901 Junipero Serra Blvd.)
Hayward—Century Theatres at Hayward (1069 B Street)
Larkspur—Century Larkspur (500 Larkspur Landing Cr.)
Mill Valley—CinéArts Sequoia (25 Throckmorton Ave.)
Richmond—Century Hilltop 16 (3200 Klose Way)
San Bruno—Century at Tanforan (The Shops at Tanforan)
San Francisco—CinéArts at the Empire (85 West Portal Ave.) and Century 9 San Francisco Centre (835 Market St.)
San Leandro—Century 16 Bayfair Mall (15555 East 14th Street)
San Mateo—Century 12 San Mateo (320 East 2nd Avenue)
San Rafael—Century Northgate (7000 Northgate Drive) and Century Regency (280 Smith Ranch Road)
Sausalito—CinéArts Marin (101 Caledonia)
I strongly encourage readers of The Evening Class to check out the No Milk for Cinemarks Theatres website to determine which Cinemark Theatres to avoid in their areas. Boycotts work. A boycott of a Sacramento theatre company resulted not only in the resignation of a Yes on 8 contributor, but a public apology and donation to the Human Rights Campaign! We can—(or as Tom Ammiano stated it more forcefully in yesterday's rally) we will—do this again.
Of related interest is that the organizers of the successful Join the Impact rally are now calling for December 10, 2008 to be Day Without A Gay, encouraging the gay community to take a historic stance against hatred by donating love to a variety of different causes. Don't call in sick, call in gay and—in alignment with International Human Rights Day—donate your time to service!UPDATE: Via Steve Silberman, DailyKos reports on internal memos from the LDS Church that reveal their longstanding strategy to defeat same-sex marriage.
