A friend called me at 12:10pm today to tell me that he was going to be late for our noon lunch meeting (which I was unaware was even happening!) and that there was a picture of me on the front page of the Task Force's website, www.thetaskforce.org.The picture was taken by Task Force communications coordinator PJ Serrano on the morning of Saturday August 26th in the Evondale neighborhood of Cincinnati during the Power Summit I attended last weekend. We were doing what is called a "canvass." I was part of a multiracial group of around 50 activists who were going to visit a neighborhood and talk to the residents about gay rights.
From 10am to about 11:45am we went door to door in a predominantly African American neighborhood, asking registered voters face to face their thoughts about equal rights for gay and transgender Cincinnati residents. We had explanatory language for transgender as people who "feel like they're not the gender they were born as."
If the person we spoke to was supportive, we asked them to sign a postcard which would be sent to their City Council member. Overall, 80% of the nearly 250 people the entire group talked to were supportive! Of course, a lot of the doors we knocked on did not have responses.
I personally talked to 8 people and knocked on something like 44 doors. Of the 8 people I talked to 4 of them signed postcards of support, one of them was undecided, 2 people were supportive but didn't want to take the time to fill out the postcard and only one person was completely unsupportive of equak rights for gay and transgender Cincinnati residents.
Part of the exercise was for us to illustrate that despite popularly held beliefs that people of color, particularly African Americans are less supportive of LGBT rights than other groups this can be shown to not be true if one takes the time to go to and engage in dialogue with African American voters.
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