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Rick Garcia (Task Force for Human Rights)

Carol Cureton’s Introduction

Our second speaker for this evening represents probably one of the youngest gay organizations, certainly in St. Louis.  [It is the] youngest, both in longevity of the organization and in the average age of the participants. I think as most of us look across the gay community in St. Louis and in our country, the hope of the community, of course, as in all communities, is put down to young people. We could probably not be represented by a finer line of people than the

[Recording begins here.]

The St. Louis Task Force for Human Rights. We laughingly joke with them, and tell them how proud we are of what they’re doing. We also tell them that they’re younger than we are, and of course we know that they can’t do the things they do, but they don’t have enough sense to know they can’t, so they just get out and do it anyway. It don’t matter. [10 seconds of applause] I don’t want anybody here to tell this young man he can’t tackle City Hall. So if we don’t tell him, we just might help him win. Rick Garcia, Coordinator for St. Louis Task Force for Human Rights. [10 seconds of applause]

Rick Garcia’s remarks

Thank you. Fantastic. Carol said a lot; I must thank her. Ah, we are young. We just celebrated our second anniversary on this Saturday, we’re two months old. [Laughter.] And I guess I would like to explain a little bit about who we are, ‘cause maybe some people don’t know. We’re a group of people who got together in response to the call from Dade County [FL] Coalition to help in the fight against Anita Bryant. I remember one day I was reading The Advocate, and I read that call, and I went upstairs to the people I’m living with and said, “We have to do something!” And we were having a party; we decided to turn that party into a fund-raising, and send those funds in. And that sounded like a good idea.

And then we had some friends over, and we were just talking in our kitchen, and it came almost to be a consciousness-raising session, because we talked of the importance of gay rights. We talked of how we are oppressed. We talked of how, you know, we might be very comfortable in our lifestyle. I know I was. I haven’t so far, Praise God, felt any kind of personal oppression because I’ve been gay. I’ve been extremely lucky. But I know that many of my brothers and sisters have not been that lucky. I know that people have been fired from their jobs and lost their housing. And I had to question myself as a person striving for Christian maturity if I could let that happen. And so with my friends in my kitchen, we talked about how can we help, what can we do?

So the first thing that we did is, we looked into the existing organizations, or to see if there were people here who were really addressing themselves to that issue. And, everyone was very concerned and committed, but nothing really very strong happened, I didn’t see, so we thought we will have to do it.

Uh, instead of having a party we decided to have a movie, A Very Natural Thing, which we heard was a very, very good movie, and from all of this, seemed like something we’d want to do in St. Louis. And it would serve two purposes. One was just fund-raising, but another purpose, which is even more important to me in my mind, was to develop a sense of gay pride, and to develop a sense of dignity and respect in the gay community, to get us together outside our typical gay hangouts. Uh, that’s really what we considered important. We did that. And thanks to the help that we received from so many people, 1000 people came to the Maplewood Theatre, uh, May 15 to see the movie.And we made money, and we sent that to Dade County. [Ed. note: a beer blast was on the 15th; the movie was shown on the 18th.]

We also had two beer blasts to raise money, and the first 150 people showed up, the second, 200. Those were our fund-raising events. The other things that we’ve done, is just recently we’ve issued a statement to the Globe-Democrat, because of a four or five part series from Chicago on child pornography and sexual abuse of children. The articles seemed to imply that homosexuals promote child pornography, promote child sexual abuse, have no problem with it. Well, we wrote a page to refute that. There’s been no response from them, of course, but they’ve got certain money, they’ve got people in the media to receive that.

One of the things the Task Force, one of our primary goals is, our long-range goals, is to work for unity among gay groups and gay people, otherwise I believe that we won’t get any kind of legislation passed, we won’t receive any kind of rights, we won’t get any respect, until we respect ourselves as individuals and we respect ourselves as a group. [Applause.] And so we are able to stand together, with our sisters and brothers. We are not going anywhere. Solidarity and unity is the key. Self-respect, integrity, dignity and pride are also to be achieved to gain our rights. No legislator is going to give us our rights. We have to take those rights. We have to stand up and be counted: we have to say we are here, we are good, we are important, and we deserve what is ours. Human rights are God-given rights. No man or woman can take those rights from us. We allow people not to give us our rights. We allow repression. And so we have to stand and fight, non-violently, because non-violence is our strength, peacefully, and with love and compassion for those persons who don’t respect us. What we have to do is, we have to be able to stand up and reach out our hands to our sisters and brothers in solidarity. We have to stand up and look to those persons who might deprive us of our rights, and say, “Enough! Enough!”. [Applause.]

Transcribed by Jim Andris August, 7, 2017 from a copy of a tape made of the event provided by John Hilgeman.