Anxiety, Joy, and Rosie Perez: On the Ground With Queers for Kamala

“A Katy Perry marching band? This is going to be the gayest day ever,” says the curly-haired woman watching as a 17-piece group works their way through “Firework,” and then follows it up with a jaunty rendition of Kesha’s “Timber.” She chuckles. “I must be in the right place.”

It’s 7:30 a.m. on the Saturday before the presidential election, and the New York City-based volunteer organizing coalition Queers for Kamala is making one last push on the weekend before the election. The original plan was for the Harris-Walz  campaign to provide five buses today to take volunteers to Pennsylvania to knock on doors. However, as the group’s co-founder Daniel Wein excitedly says, so many people signed up that the campaign sent two more buses. From today until Election Day, Queers for Kamala is expecting to send 1,411 volunteers and 17 buses to the commonwealth of Pennsylvania; and an additional two buses to New York’s 17th congressional district to support the campaign of Mondaire Jones.

As volunteers pass out free coffee and bagels and direct people to their buses, Wein, 32, notes that “for every one of us that is driving down to Pennsylvania and knocking on 50 or 100 doors, there are 10 or 20 or 30 people who don’t have the opportunity to engage in this type of direct voter engagement, who don’t have the opportunity to talk to a voter in a swing state, who don’t have the opportunity to engage in their democracy in the ways that they want to.”

“Obviously, there are things you can do remotely, but I certainly feel like we’re carrying the weight of all of those people who want to be here who can’t,” he adds. Right before the buses take off, a few more folks arrive and hurriedly run to get onboard as Wein, co-chairman Conor Sanchez-O’Shea, 28, and actor and activist Wilson Cruz climb into a car to head to Reading, Pennsylvania. As Wein notes, there’s a big Puerto Rican population there. He’s expecting it to be a good trip.

We’re three days out from Election Day. You might be able to find a pollster or analyst that will either give you some hopium or feed your doomer instincts, but all anyone really knows at this stage is that the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is brutally, ulcer-inducingly tight. “It’s going to be close,” is Wein and Sanchez-O’Shea’s understandable, unshakable official party line when asked for their predictions about Tuesday. No one is getting cocky. But it’s clear they’re feeling good, and they’re also feeling other emotions.

“It’s thrilling and anxiety-inducing. For those of us in the LGBT community, for women, and for trans individuals, the stakes could not possibly feel any higher. I’ve joked with friends that the main reason I started it with (co-founder Jeffrey Omura) is so that when we got to this point in the cycle, I could sleep at night knowing that we are leaving nothing on the table,” Wein says. “I have seen the monumental steps forward that our community has been able to make, really just over the last 10 to 15 years. So it’s not just about us backtracking on those rights, on workplace discrimination protections, on marriage, on people being able to exist in their communities without fear of harassment.

“It’s also about trans rights. I think what has been horrifying is that the Trump campaign has been spending tens of millions of dollars vilifying a group of Americans and trying to convince neighbors to fear their neighbors,” he adds. “The reason we wanted to make this mobilization possible for our community, is that the LGBTQ+ community not only knows what’s at stake, but wants to fight for it.”

As we leave New York and enter Pennsylvania, the number of political billboards by the highway immediately increases exponentially. At one point, a digital billboard shifts from a Harris ad to a Trump one, an on-the-nose metaphor for our national mindset.

A few days after President Joe Biden left the ticket and Harris became the nominee, Wein and Omura brought iPads to recruit volunteers at a Coconuts for Kamala pop-up event at New York’s City Winery. This also happened after Charli XCX posted “kamala IS brat” (the tweet heard around the world), and Wein admits that he thought it would be fun if they could paint the one bus they expected to commission with the Summer’s ubiquitous Brat-green hue. He wanted to create a sense of FOMO, to make it seem like canvassing was the coolest thing you could be doing, even if expectations were ultimately modest. 

“We walked around with iPads for 90 minutes and signed up 70 people, which is more than a full bus. And we realized, ‘this is going to be a lot bigger than just us bringing our friends to Pennsylvania. We need to have our friends, and our friends of friends, and their friends also come on buses,’” he says. “And fast forward to now, and we will be bringing more than 1500 people to Pennsylvania, the most important swing state in the country.” (Between October 5 and November 5, Queers for Kamala estimates it will have sent 1,882 volunteers total to Pennsylvania.) The organization is completely volunteer-based, with the Harris-Walz campaign sending the buses. Being a self-described “Type-A Gay Project Manager,” he immediately wanted to book as many buses right away, but the Harris campaign told him to start slow. (He also decided the green bus idea wasn’t where he needed to put his energy.) He’d recently changed careers after 15 years in tech and public policy and decided to focus on this for a while; Sanchez-O’Shea took a break from his start-up to come on board. 

Cruz has been working steadily in television and film for decades and recently completed a run on Star Trek: Discovery, but to many consumers of Clinton-era adolescent angst he’s still beloved for his first show, the seminal drama My So-Called Life, where he played the troubled gay teenager Rickie Vasquez, who at one point in the series is homeless. Wilson was the first out gay actor to play an out gay character, and the experience set him up for a life-long dedication to activism.

“I’m a child of the 90s, and growing up the biggest political issue of my time was HIV/AIDS and the decimation of my community at a time when I was discovering my own sexuality,” he says. “We’re still having similar conversations. The thing about Rickie Vasquez, was that this was a young man who was discovering his sexuality and going on a journey of self-acceptance. And I see that happening with young people to this day.”

Cruz has been spending every minute these past few months as a campaign surrogate for Harris, appearing at every rally possible and knocking on doors. His schedule is daunting, his enthusiasm is indefatigable, and his resolve is unbreakable. “I know what’s at stake. Project 2025 — which I know they continue to try to walk away from — but really, what they’re doing is changing the name to Agenda 47. Let’s just be clear about that. In it, they are explicit about the fact that they want to end, and this is their term, the ‘normalization’ of LGBTQ people into our society.” 

“They’re quite clear about the fact that they want to shame us back into the closet. We have come too far. There have been too many people who have sacrificed too much since Stonewall and even before for us to gain the rights that we’ve gained, to be able to marry the person we love, to be able to be who we are, to be able to put the picture of the person we love on our desks, to protect our young people as they discover who they are,” he adds. “What we’re battling is an attempt at erasure from society and from the government. That’s what we’re up against.”

THE HARRIS CAMPAIGN OFFICE in Reading is filled, as these places often are, with boxes of coffee and all the bagels you want. In one office, there are posters for the JFK and Jimmy Carter campaigns. A message on a whiteboard says, “There are 3 days until election day, Nov 5, 2024.” Underneath it is a paper addendum: “We Can Sleep When We’re Dead.”

Wein is wearing a jacket a friend made and lent him; it’s a bedazzled, rainbow-hued jean jacket reminiscent of the one Harris wore to a San Francisco Pride event. When a volunteer asks where he arrived from, he answers, “New York City,” and she replies, “Oh, of course.”

Roxanna Meléndez, 71, and Cindy Benk, 66, came from New York together to knock on doors, even as Meléndez admits this whole thing makes her quite nervous. “But I told her, you shouldn’t be afraid for me in terms of going in canvassing. It’s a right of Americans, it’s democratic,” says Benk, looking at her partner. This is her first time doing this sort of thing, she says. “I didn’t think I gave enough. I gave little bits of money, but I felt like, ‘I have to do something.’ 

“When I came out in the 80s, I was told that by simply being out as a lesbian, I was setting a bad example for those younger and impressionable minds and that I was converting people to an amoral lifestyle,” Benk says. “And as a college counselor and a psychotherapist, I’ve worked with members of the LGBT community who have so much shame that they didn’t think that their life was worth living. Things have started to change, but we’re not going back. And Kamala Harris will stand up for me.”

Meléndez gazes at her lovingly, smiles. And then haltingly adds, “And they call Puerto Rico a pile of garbage. I am from Puerto Rico, it’s very dear to my heart.”

She starts to speak louder and more assuredly. “Everybody has been appalled. It’s just been unimaginable,” she replies when asked what the reaction has been to in the Puerto Rican community to the joke by the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally that her home is an “island of garbage,” adding that “it’s been that way since [Hurricane] Maria, when [Trump] threw paper towels at us, and we needed help and he blocked funding.”

There’s a pro-Palestine protest group right outside the campaign headquarters, waving flags calling for an arms embargo on Israel and divestment. As Yasmin Hariri, 27, starts talking, we’re nearly drowned out by a chant from one of the protesters. “It’s been a tough few months. I think I sense the frustration in our generation as we approach this election, and I have felt some of it myself as well,” she says. “I’ve engaged in a lot of difficult conversations about the trade-offs of who we’re voting for, and I think through those conversations, I’ve learned a lot about what’s at stake and the fact that truly, no candidate and no party is ever going to be perfect and represent all of us in, in every single aspect and in every single issue area.”

She’s been volunteering at Planned Parenthood since she was in high school. We can’t afford to be single-issue voters, she notes, as everything is on the line. But she grants that “it terrifies me to think about having a candidate or really someone in office who doesn’t honor a woman’s right to their bodily autonomy and affordable, safe, accessible reproductive health care.” Her friend, Brendan Liu, 25, who she will be canvasing with today, adds: “There are so many intractable problems that are going on in the country right now. I mean, rising wealth and income inequality, falling union density, rising cost of living, and the frustration around the country is palpable and is real. There’s two candidates in this election. One of them has a plan, and that’s Kamala Harris. And another one has a concept of a plan, and that’s Donald Trump. And I think for me, the choice could not be clearer.”

This will be Hariri’s first time knocking on doors. The war in Gaza, the Supreme Court decision ending the federal right to an abortion, and the general downcast nature of the times have gotten to her and everyone she knows, she says. But just being here is a sign she isn’t giving up. 

“There are shared anxieties among young people as we look at the future. I think optimism, which we all felt growing up under the Obama administration, has felt lost for some time. But I think there’s a sense of it coming back, and there’s a seed of it that I’m trying to help cultivate in these conversations,” she says, smiling faintly. “And hopefully today, as we go knock on doors, we will try to find that within people. It can be hard to find, but it’s there.”

Tom Walz, 38, isn’t technically Tim Walz’s nephew, even though that’s how Wein introduces him. They’re more like distant cousins. Tom first met the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate, whose logo is on the hat he is wearing, in 2002, when Tim taught at a youth-focused offshoot of Camp Wellstone, the political boot camp that launched Tim’s career. Eventually, his dad clarified the nature of their familial relationship, but Tim Walz still said, “Oh, just call me your Uncle Tim,” Tom clarifies. He’s been helping out his cousin “Uncle Tim” since 2018, and he jokes that these days his boss at the sports merchandising company he works for calls this his night and weekend job.

“Minnesota is a nice place. And the politics of nice take on a lot of different manifestations. But there’s this idea that whether you’re a Republican in the mold of Tim Pawlenty or a Democrat in the mold of Paul Wellstone, you’re generally looking out for the well-being of people,” he says. “And so I grew up in a household of Democrats. But we had Republican friends who we knew and trusted, and that generally had people’s best interests at heart. I don’t know if I can say the same about the party under Donald Trump.”

THE FIRST TIME Cruz and Sanchez O’Shea knock on a door today, it’s a swing and a miss. She was 92, and she says she’s not going to vote. “I asked her if we could change her mind, and she said nope,” says Cruz.

No one answers at the next five houses they knock on. It’s a beautiful day, after all, and the Ohio-Penn game is on. And these people have all been contacted a million times before, but it’s the canvassers’ job to try for a million and one. The persuasion phase of Queers for Kamala is over, and today is all about contacting Democrats, or at least people the campaign believes are Democrats, to make sure they will vote and have a plan. (Though mail-in ballots are available, Pennsylvania does not have early in-person voting.)

“I’m fine,” says an older man who then shuts the door.

“I don’t know anything about her,” states a woman, who then closes the door, clearly not interested in learning more. 

“I do,” replies one man when asked if they have a plan to vote, “but I’m not discussing it with you.”

Three rejections in a row would ding the confidence of anyone, but Cruz still radiates positivity. However, he does allow that “I wish I was talking to more Puerto Ricans.”  (Cruz is of Puerto Rican descent.) 

Each volunteer will, over the course of a several-hour shift, knock on doors at 40 to 50 houses, and will likely have five to 10 direct voter inactions. The brutal, unforgiving math of swing-states means that, as Sanchez O’Shea points out, “one of these people voting is worth a busload of New Yorkers.” As we’re walking, Wein excitedly points out a message from the Harris campaign that volunteers are knocking on 2,000 doors a minute in Pennsylvania. 

“We voted,” replies a couple before Sanchez O’Shea can finish his question.

The next house they knock on, a young girl answers. She notes she’s not old enough to vote, but the people they are asking for will do it later. They move on to the next house.

“We just want to see if you had a plan to vote on Tuesday,” asks Cruz. 

“I do,” replies the woman. Her elementary school-age daughters quickly come out of the house to say hello. “I’m voting for them, and bringing them with me.” Cruz sits down to say hello to the girls, and gives them his Taylor Swift-inspired Harris campaign friendship bracelet. Wein notes that’s the last one they have. Cruz and Sanchez O’Shea are beaming ear to ear.

The sign on the next house reads, “Welcome To The Shit Show. Hope You Brought Alcohol.” They knock, and a voice from the buzzer tells them to leave the package at the doorstep. They shrug and move on. We walk by a house with a sign stating, “Even My Dog Is Voting For Trump.” Cruz says, “Let’s skip that one.”

The next door they knock on, a middle-aged Black woman answers and says she’s planning on voting, “and not for that idiot.” She’ll be bringing everyone in the house with her. “That’s all you need to know,” Cruz says when they walk away, thrilled that her entire family is coming along.

His next few days are packed. There’s a rally tonight and a karaoke party in Philadelphia. There’s also a big Harris event on Monday he’s speaking at; there’s a mystery guest even he doesn’t know about. It could be Taylor Swift, it’s posited. “It would be a way for her to make history,” Wein offers. Or maybe Bad Bunny will show up. If that happens, “I would shit myself,” Cruz offers. He’ll hardly have a moment to himself in the next three days, but it’s fine. It’s been like this for most of the summer.

“Fear is a motivator. I don’t want to lose my country, and I don’t want to lose this election,” he says. “I’ve been telling people it’s going to take all of us. This is literally an all-hands-on-deck moment, and I’m just adding my hands. There’s a fire in the house. Grab a hose.”

Next up is the caravana, a party on wheels in which cars outfitted with Harris signs drive through Puerto Rican neighbors, honking, waving and playing music, mostly Bad Bunny, at least in this case. “It’s a loud, boisterous Puerto Rican celebration of our right to vote,” he explains.

A few minutes after arriving at the start of the caravana, the actress Rosie Perez, who will be speaking at tonight’s event, shows up. This was an unexpected encounter, but she’s more than willing to get some thoughts off her chest. About a month ago, she was feeling pretty “eh,” she says, making the iffy hand gesture, but now she’s feeling great, and ready to help her people “feel great about going to the polls and having their voice be heard, taking all their angst and their anger and their excitement and just tumbling it down and into that booth.”

She smiles and then gets a steely look in her eyes. “What happened last Sunday at Madison Square Garden in my city,” she says, pointedly, “has galvanized me and a lot more other people.” (Perez is also of Puetro Rican descent) 

“I was very, very shocked to be honest, and hurt and angry. But I also was very, very disappointed that this man who says he wants to run the country for all, didn’t come out on the stage and denounce those comments,” she explains. “I think it has definitely shifted the race. I mean, the enthusiasm that has been happening in New York City, forget about it. It has galvanized everyone. 

There’s been some talk in the past few days, at least in social media corners, of a late-breaking vibe shift toward Harris, and Perez seems to feel that. “When I came here to Pennsylvania, I was wondering, is it going to be the same enthusiasm? And it was tenfold. I was shocked, I was so happily shocked. The reason why the spotlight is on us right now is because we don’t take it sitting down. It is not in our DNA. He picked on the wrong people and he’s feeling the heat,” she says. “His whole campaign is feeling the heat. Right now, his rhetoric has ramped up because he’s feeling very, very desperate. And if a small group of people in the United States can make that man nervous, just imagine if all the other groups that were also offended came out just as loud and as proud as we have been. Forget about it. I really think that the tide has turned, and it has turned in favor of Kamala Harris.”

As more people gather to begin the caravana, Cruz takes a moment for a pep talk for his people. Grabbing a bullhorn, he gets right into it: “This community is voting for a president who believes in our dignity and humanity and who is stepping up with a plan to improve conditions there. As opposed to someone who laughs at us, who has shown us exactly what he thinks of us.” 

As he nears a fever pitch of emotion, seeming to keep finding a new register of passion, he says, “You’re going to feel better, because you’ll have left everything on the field this weekend. And you will know that on Tuesday, whatever the result — and we know what the result will be — you’re going to feel like you were part of something amazing.”

BACK AT THE FIELD OFFICE, everyone is grabbing pizza and sodas after a long day. Some look absolutely exhausted, others are chatting with their fellow volunteers. One person initiates a pro-Harris call and response chant, as often happens in these sorts of places.

Recapping her day, Hariri says she was feeling a bit nervous about knocking on strangers’ doors, but found the experience rewarding, like exposure therapy for free-floating anxieties. “It’s always uncomfortable to approach a conversation when you don’t know where someone is coming from, what background, what personal histories, what beliefs they’re coming from in those conversations,” she says. “But at the end of the day, I started to realize it’s not that different from talking to family members who have different beliefs, friends who have different beliefs. And we’ve been practicing that over the past year with conflicts that are happening in the world and, and even just issues that we’re voting on every day.”

She heard consistently, she says, that “people are tired of hearing the harmful and mean rhetoric of Donald Trump. I interacted with a Puerto Rican American who said, ‘I’m Puerto Rican, and the things I heard this week were all I needed to be 100 percent sure of my vote.’ I think there was a sense of, we don’t really want to hear this anymore. And we’re so ready for change. And there’s faith in Harris and fighting for what matters to folks.” Liu looks over to her and offers that “towards the end, there was one voter you talked to that said that she’s really genuine,” he says of Harris. “And I was really glad to hear that. I hope that that message is widely getting through to a lot of voters, because I feel that it’s really true, and it’s evident in the work that she’s done over her entire career.”

Before he gets on the bus to head home, Tom Walz mentions that “we had a conversation with what I think might be a shy Harris voter. We knocked on the door. We noticed that her husband was a registered independent, and she was a registered Democrat,” he says. “When we knocked on the door she smiled broadly. And said, ‘Oh, no, we’ve decided as a couple. We’re voting for Trump.’ But she gave us a little wink and we went on our way.”

Tom Walz is a member of the queer community, and wastes no words in explaining why he’s been working for the campaign nonstop. Like Tim Walz, he has an open face and a voice that easily swells with emotion. “The Republican Party has made no secret of the fact that they would like to take away health care options for women and for the LGBTQ community. There have been multiple challenges to PREP and other LGBT health care issues, including for the trans community by Republican attorneys general and by other Republican elected officials,” he says. He’s particularly incensed by the non-stop anti-transgender ads the Trump campaign has been blanketing the airwaves with during the closing days of the election.

“I think that demonization of any population is straight out of the playbook of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and to watch American elected officials do that and replay some of the things I know my own grandparents fought in World War II against is really disturbing,” he says, “especially when it’s a very small and marginalized portion of the population that has had an outsized influence in this election.”

Over the summer, his distant cousin “Uncle Tim”gained a legion of online fans who learned that he became the faculty sponsor of his school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, and fought for queer rights as the governor of Minnesota. “I think Tim has done a fabulous job in Minnesota of being an ally and a strong supporter on all of the issues that that community wanted loud support on in the campaign.” 

First, point out that once you’ve won political capital, “you burn it to make people’s lives better.” That’s Tim’s philosophy, and he’s done it for the community in Minnesota. I think he would do so as Vice President.”

At the end of the day, Wein is still not willing to say much more than that election night is going to be close, which is fair enough. But he now has more volunteers that want to go Pennsylvania than buses that can send them there, he allows. That doesn’t assure a Harris victory by any means, but at least he knows he did everything he could. 

“Everyone who has shown up to canvass with us today, tomorrow, all the way through Election Day, they’re doing it because they don’t want to leave anything on the table. They want to make sure that they did everything possible to have an impact in this election,” he says. “I think that there are definitely people who feel like in 2016, they didn’t do everything they could because they had become complacent. I think many of us were complacent. 

“We have learned that lesson, and we’re not going to be making the same mistake again.”