Our friend Richard Grayson, author of Who Will Kiss the Pig, Sex Stories for Teens, and other books went to the Brooklyn Peace Fair and came back with this report.

I went to several of the morning workshops and wandered around the booths of various organizations and other groups (including the Brooklyn Public Library). It was nice to be on the LIU campus after 30 years — the last semester I taught there was summer ’78, and it’s very much nicer now.

A big presence was Brooklyn for Peace, formerly Brooklyn Parents for Peace, whose members introduced some of the workshops; they had three each at 11:15, 12:15, and 1:15.

First I went to “War and Warming: Environmentalism and the Iraq War,” presented by the New York State Apollo Alliance, a coalition of labor, business, environment and environmental justice organizations that is trying to fight global warming and for good green “clean energy” jobs.

Jeff Jones from the Albany area, who works a lot in the state capitol, said that most Americans oppose the war in Iraq even as our lifestyle based on fossil fuels demands it. He presented an interest talk with PowerPoint, as did Jack Dafoe of Urban Agenda, the local Apollo Alliance affiliate, who discussed creating clean energy jobs in the city and their involvement with the private sector and plaNYC. It was an interesting talk to the 25 of us in the lecture classroom. (Sitting across from me, I noticed, was Kathy Boudin — Weather Underground, West 11th St. townhouse explosion and Brink robbery are what first came to my mind, but I believe she’s become a public health expert since leaving prison.)

At 12:15 p.m., I went to the workshop “Media Criticism as a Tool for Social Justice.” Partha Banerjee, the immigration rights activist who’s a board member, I think, of Brooklyn for Peace, began by talking about the organization and then introduced Isabel Macdonald, communications director at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), and Laurel Heisman of Paper Tiger TV, the video collective whose work analyzes and critiques issues involving media, culture and politics. They went over ways to detect media news bias, including sources, stereotypes, loaded language, double standards and false balance. This workshop had more audience participation in the form of questions and commentary.

The last workshop I chose to go to was “History Walks With US: Dialoging Across Racial & Gender Divides,” was facilitated by Daniel Jose Older, a lead organizer for Reflect Connect Move: Brooklyn Neighborhoods Against Gender Violence. He began by discussing gender violence, which he encounters working as a paramedic, and the tyranny of the passive voice in discussions of this issue. When we say that so-and-so was abused, it somehow lessens the importance that someone is doing the abusing (99.7% of abusers are men, he said) and prevents an honest examination of the reasons behind gender violence.

He asked audience members to brainstorm on male stereotypes and the workshop then got into deeper issues. For me, a lot of the stuff about male stereotypes and male violence against women was not new — I remember a very similar workshop at a 1973 Brooklyn College men’s consciousness-raising group I was a member of — but sadly, the issue of gender violence makes them still relevant 35 years later.

Unfortunately, I was unable to stay to hear featured speaker Debbie Almontaser, Marty Markowitz, or any of the other speakers, poets and performers. Perhaps someone else who attended will give a report.