rozk | A little thing I threw together

I was sitting chatting about tomorrow night's demo with

auntysarah and started thinking about demos dead and gone, and the miners' march in the rain when one person started whistling 'Always look on the bright side of life' and someone else picked it up and suddenly forty thousand people were singing it, in rain and defeat.

Quite suddenly, I decided we needed a song tomorrow night and I had one of those fits of improvisation that I used to get when young. This is to the tune of that highly sectarian old CND song Harry Was a Commy which is basicly My Old Man's a Dustman in the pre-skiffle version which repeats the last line of each verse twice, then the third line and then the last line again, as a sort of chorus.

Stonewall was a riot
Drag queens and butch dykes
Not the sort of demo
That Ben Summerskill Likes

Stonewall, they threw dustbins
Hurled bricks at the law
Summerskill throws parties
And don't hurl bricks no-more

Stonewall rioters went to jail
Fighting for their rights
Summerskill serves cocktails
And goes to gala nights

That was real Stonewall
Now it's just a name
Summerskill leaves trans folk out
And never feels the shame

We are the trans nation
Won't take crap no more
Summerskill can hear us
Shout outside his door!

That'll do nicely, I think.

Oh, and a couple of chants 'LGB - where's the T?' and 'Half of T are LGB'. I knew there was a reason why I have always been such a demo junky - now I can use this power for good.

(I'm working on a version of 'For all the saints' but unfortunately it would be inappropriate for tomorrow night because the obvious chorus is 'Julie Bindel, sing Julie Bindel' and we are so not going to concentrate on her tomorrow.