Queer activists GlitterBomb! blitz Pride

The LGBT group aims to bring radical politics back into gay life

If the activist group GlitterBomb! was a terror alert color, its level would be ROYGBIV — zero violence, but sprinkled all over the place. The queer collective assembled in homage to the glitter-throwers at Marcus Bachmann’s gay reparative therapy clinic as well as those who made glitter rain on anti-LGBT rights politician Newt Gingrich. Despite Gingrich’s waaambulance ride to the New York Times citing the booboo-free act as “an assault,” glitterbombing is essentially pacifist. On the eve of Gay Pride week, GlitterBomb! (who asked to remain anonymous) talks about protest, politics and why it’s so over “Will and Grace.”

CL: You cite an important part of your manifesto as “the inclusion of the excluded.” To whom does this refer?
?GlitterBomb!: Whenever you look at queer activism there’s very much an exclusion. Whenever the HRC talks about marriage equality, the image that they’re prescribing to society is two “Will and Grace” characters: two white gay men who have lawyer jobs who are higher class that just want to get married and have babies and have a nice little condo. You will never see the HRC prescribing this type of marriage equality for a leather daddy and a drag queen. So there’s definitely this exclusion that exists in gay equality, and GlitterBomb! wants to try to support the direction for queer to get back to radical and to get back to inclusive as opposed to exclusive.

CL: So this group is about queer advocacy as well as gay advocacy?
?GB: Yes. Queer is a much broader queer ideology than gay. It goes from everything to classism, immigration rights to homophobia. We want the Atlanta gay community to recognize that politics are extremely important and that it’s more than gay issues that matter.

We want to look at everything that makes us who we are. Not just a singular issue of what our movement should be or what we should be fighting for, because what’s gay rights to you might totally rock your world, but for me, if I’m undocumented or I’m disabled, fighting in the military’s not really gonna do anything for me.

CL: There were rumors throughout the city about your plans to glitterbomb Atlanta’s Gay Pride this year. Can you shed some light on the rumors, your issues with Pride and your actual plans for the festival?
?GB: Our problem with Pride was that their three main corporate sponsors — Delta, Coca-Cola and Bud Light — have all given money to Nathan Deal, and Nathan Deal was a supporter of HB 87, of racial profiling. So yeah, they’re giving us $50,000, but it’s through this whole gay consumerism, like rainbow-colored vodka bottles, which is not exactly what the existence of Pride was created for.

We recently met with “Shef” James Parker Sheffield, the Executive Director of Atlanta Pride. He told me that people had said that we were going to bomb Pride, that we were going to bomb Piedmont Park. Of course we were like, “No, that’s not happening.” Shef was really cool. He was extremely supportive. He was like, “This radical voice needs to be heard.”

So GlitterBomb! is actually going to do exactly what we had talked about: Bring politics back in the Pride march. We’re going to have signs about HB 87, probably signs about Troy Davis and justice for an end to the death penalty. We’re also having a free dance party called “Glitter-done” at Mary’s on Saturday night at 10 with DJ Ree De La Vega and DJ Fluff. We feel it’s important to keep things free.