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I am not asking a rhetorical question, I really would be interested in knowing if anyone around the world knows of a rally where disabled rights leaders were among the diversity of the invited speakers, and if anybody out there knows of any rallies that bothered to include in their general announcement publicity, information to make it PWD-friendly. My experience with these sorts of rallies is that they'll say they're big on having a "full" diversity of people represented among the speakers, but then they proceed to define "diversity" in a narrow manner that leaves out half of the stigmatised classes / identity groups that the term diversity actually encompasses. They act out pecking orders and exclusion. Not to mention, then I always see these inaccessible stages. And other details of how these things are often planned in a way that discriminates among people with certain disabilities in the audience. And the planning question of -- "march or rally?" As if everyone can do a long march. The huge LGBT Rights march-rally in Washington DC in I think it was '93 promised that since it was a long march, a couple of busses would be chartered to take people with disabilities who couldn't do the march, to the rally site. It turns out that when the two charter bus drivers heard that it was a L/G/B/T/ march, at the last minute they decided they both didn't feel like showing up for work that day (AIDS-phobia? I suspect, more than homophobia alone), and the bus company didn't bother to replace them; so the promised busses did not exist. (I had to take a subway & taxi to get to the rally site; and still did so much more walking than I am able to do with several kinds of arthritis, that the next day I just stayed in bed to get the severe joint pain to go back down so I could walk.) A written contract, simply ignored. I urged the march organisers to file a discrimination complaint against the bus company to reduce the likelihood of this happening next time, but the organisers never responded. At a recent anti-war rally in the US, I happened to hear that an acquaintance of mine was selected a the one token LGBT speaker associated with the LGBT rights movement; and he said he was told to limit his remarks to 60 or 90 seconds or something like that. This at a rally with scores of speakers, many of whom as it turned out, had no time limit, one I heard of the radio went on for over ten minutes. A few years previous to that, before a rally on the anniversary of the '63 March On Washington, negotiations to have at least one speaker out of dozens, be a LGBT rights movement-associated person, ended with a lesbian getting a minute or so of stage time to speak, who was told that she could mention in passing that she was a lesbian, but she was pressured to agree in advance NOT to mention that such a thing as a lesbian or LGBT human rights movement struggle even existed. In exchange for getting the tiniest of time slots for her micro-speech, she agreed to this utterly humiliating anti-free speech condition which was imposed on no other rally speakers, and her group (that had sat in in non-voting District of Columbia's congressional representative's office to get this semi-tokenism) then, rather improbably, declared victory. And who was the primary organizer of that '63 March on Washington which was being commemorated? An 'out' gay man named Bayard Rustin; who was rewarded for his efforts by being squeezed out of the movement by the preachers... (Out historian John D'Emilio has been researching a biography on him, for many years...) It is not easy to make progress on getting political orgs to be disability-friendly, because firstly - nobody seems to be in charge when these human rights / equal access concerns are brought up, and secondly - these groups often have no institutional memory at least for for these things, so as a rights advocate you're always starting at square one; and they're always acting like you're the fist person who ever mentioned this stuff to them, in their whole lives. And as soon as any given AB political org. leader leaves that job, any agreements vanish with him / her as the new leader predictably says: "...well, I didn't agree to that; nobody told me anything about it..." etc. ; the orgs seem to lack enough organisational stability to even make such agreements as orgs., and will even deny that there is any such thing as an org. (not just a leader) agreeing to such things. What to do? Where to start? The tiniest most cost-free first-step thing these AB political orgs could do is just include accessibility status information in announcements of meetings and events. Instead of making some people, PWDs, go through endless telephone tag or e-mail tag to find out basic accessibility info. (I find that announced info is far more reliable then accessibility info you phone up / write to them for; the person returning the call often doesn't understand the question and blithely gives false reassurances. Then after some difficult and expensive travel, you get there and find out the true facts... Has anyone ever written about this whole topic of AB political organizations and how they are or are not disability-friendly? I recall only one article, in a disability magazine, about a particular case I think in Berkeley. But an article looking at the larger status question across many orgs, would certainly be a useful thing if somebody would like to tackle this topic. We have a human right to partipate without discrimination in the public accomodations of the public sphere, and in political events in public space. Do disabled rights leaders ever get put on a mostly-AB rally speakers' list to make the list more diverse, and then get told it's on the firm condition that they don't mention even in passing that the DR movement even exists? Maybe I'll write it myself.... any research bits or photos anyone can offer (sent direct) would be greatly appreciated. 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