"Nothing says it like a song..."
Sandy Rapp is an author, songwriter and grassroots activist who recounted her battles with the religious right in the book God's Country: A Case Against Theocracy; The Haworth Press. Rapp’s CD We The People is a feminist and gay issues collection of original songs which Gay Today's Jack Nichols calls Rapp "Dylanesque."
Rapp's appearances include the million-plus 2004 March For Women's Lives, the National Women's Music Festival, National NOW Rallies in Seneca Falls, Manhattan, and Washington, DC, the National Women's Political Caucus Conference, the Gulf Coast Womyn's Festival, Chicago's Autumnfest, New York State NOW Conferences, Montana Pride Rally, and many, many, more. Below: an "exclusive" interview with Ragged Blade, upon receipt of her latest CD Still Marchin'.
Do we need to be Still Marchin'? And why?
Still? My God we're about to have to start all over again! Gay rights are grounded in Constitutionally protected birth-control and abortion privacy rights, which are about to fall to the George W. Bush Court
If privacy rights fall, states will begin recriminalizing gay relations. And, as we speak, the Bush Administration is subpoenaing Internet records of those who access "pornography." Until very recent history, gays have been kept almost completely invisible in art, literature, and the theater by virtue of "anti-porn" censorship laws.
This phenomenon has often proved fatal, in that under this guise the government has blocked gay specific (i.e., effective) HIV and sex education. Also, the invisibility fostered by institutionalized homophobia contributes mightily to the high suicide rate for gay youth.
I'm a founding member of a national First Amendment organization (Feminists For Free Expression) which addresses such issues on the legal front. I suppose this is "marchin'" in the larger sense.
Do a lot of people say "come on, are you STILL marching?"
Mostly people thank us for being in the fight all these many years.
Do a lot of younger gays & lesbians avoid "marching" because they aren't familiar with "where we came from?" What can, or should, we do about that?
Recent marches, gay and feminist, have enjoyed huge participation among the young, over half in some cases. However some, of recent generations, have no idea what can happen in the wink of a Justice's eye. And Red Amerika ain't so good anyway. Two-thirds of these United States do not include gays in basic civil rights protections, let alone recognize same sex unions.
Define your "agenda" in a few sentences.
I want to get the government out of Americans' sex lives and establish equal rights regardless of gender and orientation.
Your melodies are mostly simple and easy to pick up, is this to encourage people to sing along?
I write big, simple melodies with unambiguous chords moving beneath them. I want my music to align your chakras, not confuse them. And yes, I make those choruses accessible for participation.
Would you say in the kind of songs you sing, that the words take on extra importance compared to the average pop song?
My stuff is hard to market because it tells history, our GLBT history and our feminist history. It's pretty much out of the expected rubric. But if you hear it once, you've got the message.
What do you think all this marching has accomplished?
Everything. Marches heralded the whole civil rights movement, with the organizing and the visibility and the media attention. Of course, many of those early marches ended with people chaining themselves to the buildings in DC, Albany, and elsewhere.
In April of 2004 we, that being NOW, Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and a host of other sophisticated mainstream lobbying organizations, held the biggest march in history. The '04 DC March For Women's Lives was over a million strong, including stars and politicians from Cybill Shepherd, to Hillary Clinton, to Ani DiFranco, to lesser knowns like me.
As it happens, the conglomerated media is, to a great extent, taking marching orders from the White House, so we're not getting the coverage we should. Major broadcasters, threatened with the capricious and ever-broadening scope of the FCC, are afraid that if they cover counter Administration events they'll be zapped with bankrupting "obscenity" counts on another day. It took the strength of a hurricane, namely Katrina, to start tumbling this scarecrow.
We warned of exactly what is happening now. The Courts are falling to right wing religionists, whose backlash we've been predicting for the past 35 years.
There's a video out about the '04 March, if anyone wants to check the website:
MY CHOICE March Video
And if anyone wants the song I sang there (Remember Rose: A Song For Choice) you can download it here or I'll send them a free mp3 from SandyRapp.com. The track features a cameo guest vocal by the late Congresswoman Bella Abzug (D-NY).
Is there still a place for an old fashioned protest song in the wake of some of the more aggressive protesting methods we see today?
I don't see many aggressive methods at all. What we're up against are incredibly advertising-savvy right-wing think tanks, and we'd better get more of our own.
Still, few exercises are more effective than a march. Each marcher is an activist, energized by the event to organize hundreds, or maybe thousands more. By the way, we marchers do more than march twice a decade. Most of us lobby, write, and organize on a weekly or daily basis. We are the reason there are such rights as exist today.
For example I requested and organized all the early gay-positive legislation on Long Island, NY, including the East Hampton Town and Suffolk County gay bills in the eighties, along with gay sensitivity training for the police, all of which policies are still in place. I wrote a book on these issues, God's Country: A Case Against Theocracy: Haworth Press 1991 (also available at amazon.com).
Then, to celebrate these victories the gay community had to lobby again for a few years to get permits for what will be in 2006 the Sixteenth Annual Long Island Pride Parade, a march at which I have played for many years.
And we used my songs in Buffalo, in the early nineties, when busloads of anti-choicers had come to block women's clinics and hospitals in the name of "life." My partner, Marilyn Fitterman (now Northeast Regional Director of National NOW) and I were in charge of musically marching our clinic defense troops from one site to the other. It's a fairly dangerous practice, in that a number of practitioners have been assassinated by the antis. I suppose that's Marchin with a capital "M."
And yes, nothing says it like a song. Although I'm proud to be placed in the 60s genre, my songs are generally much more detailed, musically and lyrically, than is 60's folk. And of course, there were no gay songs in the 60s, almost none in the 70s, and precious few in the 80s.
As it happens, there's a review OUT that explains my music somewhat better than I can. Outmusic Spotlight: Jed Ryan Reviews Sandy Rapp's Still Marchin'
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