Buju Banton Protest At The Rockit Room-ish

October 13, 5:31 PMExploring San Francisco ExaminerGerry Morales

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Protesters hamming it up for the cameras.

Last week, someone sent me an e-mail asking me to protest The Rock"it" Room on Clement Street against scheduled performer and alleged homphobe, Buju Banton. My first response was to stand in solidarity with the gay community and arrive at the club armed with raw eggs. After some thought, my second response was, well wait...who the hell is Buju Banton? I took to the internet and googled him to find a lot of information both verifiable and rumored. I guess he wrote a song 20 years ago ("Boom Boom Bye") calling for the murder of gay people (I relied on a translated YouTube clip of the song to help me understand what he was even saying). He apologized for it, then he didn't, then he did, then he didn't. The situation was rather ambiguous.

The truth is that lately, I don't put too much credence into wikipedia entries and since I relied on a lot of non verifiable data from the internet, I felt that I didn't have a lot of information to get a full understanding of the situation. Even on the day of the event, I read that he met with gay leaders in San Francisco and the outcome was as ambiguous as his stand on the song he wrote. (http://lezgetreal.com/?p=22237) .

I still went to the protest to check it out. The group consisted of about 15 to 20 protesters engaged with TV cameras more than the concert goers. The chanting and picketing started when the cameras started rolling and when the lights went down, the protesters talked amongst themselves, called friends on the phone to ask if they saw them on TV, they even went in the bar next door to get a drink. It seemed like a circus...even Frank Chu was there!  I left at around 11:00 p.m. and I didn't wait to see if the scene turned into something out of "Do The Right Thing". I'm pretty sure things went off all right (although now there is a rumor on the internet about the show turning violent as the evening progressed). My perception was that the evening was more of a photo opportunity than a full throated protest against homophobia.