Crazy Fingers

A while back, I wrote about a billboard a bunch of us put up in Denver when the Dead played there in 1992, after the voters in Colorado approved an anti-gay ballot initiative. (Check out some recent comment activity on that post about the billboard.) The billboard was sort of based on stickers that some of us had printed. This is what I wrote about the stickers:

We printed tens-of-thousands of the stickers, and I personally handed out thousands. It was amazing to walk around the parking lot of a show, or circulate inside a venue, just giving something away. I got to meet and talk to many cool people. Almost everybody accepted the sticker with a smile and I can’t recall any negative reaction because of what the stickers stood for. People would slap the stickers on their shirts or jackets, and after a while it seemed like everyone who passed by was wearing one. I imagine many intermission or post-show conversations about “what does this mean” and kids putting it together that it’s ok to be gay or that it’s in keeping with the deadhead community to welcome brothers and sisters with all kinds of sexual orientations. (Being a deadhead used to mean being part of a big, welcoming community, which is what attracted me in the first place, I think. Giving stuff away, randomly, was a community-building activity. It was not uncommon for someone to affix supermarket produce stickers on random strangers, for example. Our Ain’t No Time To Hate stickers fit perfect into that tradition.)

Anyway, I was happy to discover that Jimi posted an image of one of the stickers on =Coffee House Studio=, and I included it here. (I’m too lazy to actually scan one.)