War Rally Parade

During the summer of 1991, my friends and I were still pissed off about Gulf War 1.0. The small southern town of Harrisonburg, Virginia planned a 4th of July parade that would celebrate our victory abroad, and we decided to do something about it. Knowing we’d probably get our asses kicked if we did a direct, visible protest, we instead wanted to do something a little different.

First, we created an organization that would represent the protests, an organization we knew would push as many buttons as possible. We referred to ourselves as the “vegetarian homosexual antiwar liberation brigade” and–to announce our presence–a couple friends altered a billboard downtown so that, instead of reading “Shomo Realty” it declared “Homo Reality.”

The next step was to alert the local media about the billboard and to tell them that we would be protesting against the Gulf War by sacrificing a litter of kittens at the end of the parade route. (The idea was that it would be disgustingly ironic that people would be horrified about a litter of kittens when nearly a quarter million Iraqi civilians died as a result of the air war.)

Once the festivities started, we dropped nonsensical flyers from the top of a building along the parade route. My favorite flyer someone made was “Free Blow Jobs for Cops.” We knew we weren’t changing the world, or anything like that; we just wanted spoil the party for as many deserving people as possible. The local paper reported the next day that an angry crowd had gathered where we said we would sacrifice the kittens, but–of course–we were sitting on top of the roof laughing.