It was Pride and Drag Queen picket day in Los Angeles, where around 300 people hit up Warner Bros. Discovery to highlight their issues as the strike marches into its second month.
The hundreds of writers attending the picket were provided glitter and stickers for their signs on the first day of Pride month. The event attracted the likes of Severance creator Dan Erickson to Yellowjackets star Liv Hewson.
“When queer writers are under attack,” chanted the crowd, “What do we do? Stand up, fight back.” Others added, “If we don’t get it, shut it down.”
Signs featured sayings such as “Protect All Queer Art” and “I’m Gay For Pay” as Whitney Houston’s I’m Every Woman blasted from a speaker system.
John August, a member of the WGA West’s negotiating committee and writer behind movies including Big Fish and Aladdin, was among those out in Burbank.
“Going into this [strike], we wanted to make sure that we were looking out for vulnerable members of our community,” he told Deadline. “Why I want to be here for this Pride picket is the history of the queer rights movement has been about struggle, about being visible. It’s not just the individual coming out, it’s actually a bunch of people coming out together to say that this is what needs to change. It feels right and appropriate for a bunch of gay and queer people to be out here, making their voices heard.”
Going in to the second month of the strike, August said there’s still “tremendous energy” for the labor action. “We’ll see as the temperatures rise, how our spirits feel, but I think we’re going to be able to keep this momentum going,” he said.
Earlier today, the WGA put out a statement to members saying that the AMPTP’s “divide and conquer” strategy isn’t working and that the studios won’t be able to pit guilds against each other. It also accused the studios of “gas-lighting” union members and telling a “lie” about the breakdown of their contract negotiations on May 1.
“That playbook isn’t working this time,” August added. “We’re more unified and there’s more solidarity than we’ve ever seen before.”
Jean Ansolabehere, who has written on series such as Netflix’s Matt Groening animated comedy Disenchantment, is a member of both the Animation Guild and WGA.
“I’m a queer writer and one of the things that’s really scary is a lot of the queer and underrepresented communities are the ones that are just coming up in the writing world and just becoming voices that are represented so it’s especially scary and this makes it feel like an act of joy rather than an act of terror,” Ansolabehere told Deadline.
This echoes the Middle Eastern Writers Committee’s thoughts as they were out earlier in the week.
Elsewhere in LA, there was a KPop picket outside of NBCUniversal, a group of cyclists went from Sony to CBS Radford for Bike The Strike! and a slew of writers including a number of Modern Family writers were celebrating Greta Gerwig, director of the upcoming Barbie movie, outside of Fox.
Over in New York, there was a Pride Month-themed rally outside Netflix headquarters in downtown Manhattan.
As many as two hundred demonstrators walked picket lines on both sides of the street outside Netflix. Marchers included Succession’s Juliana Canfield, Rescue Me’s Adam Ferrara and Law & Order: SVU’s Robert Klein and Angels in America playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner.
There was an impassioned speech by playwright and Euphoria co-producer Jeremy O. Harris.
“One of the reasons why it’s so exciting that there could be an affinity group of people striking is that so much of what we’re striking for is to maintain the ability for queer people to be able to make stories that are not just content, that are complex, that move in the odd, crooked lines we often do. AI can’t tell our stories because AI is primarily made by white, straight men,’ he said.
Harris told a story about how his grandmother used to bake pies in their union town.
“All we’re getting is crumbs. We just want to be able to make a little bit of pie after we made them theirs,” he added.
Contact screenwriter James V. Hart said writers like him struck for residuals on VHS tapes and then again for the residuals on DVDs, and that they’re striking now for greater residuals from streaming. “Those of you that haven’t had the luxury or the honor of receiving those checks every quarter,” he said, “I’m here to tell you I’ve lived on my residuals and my pension from the Writers Guild for the past 20 years. It’s worth fighting for.”
After the Pride rally in NY, striking writers redeployed to a planned location shoot near City Hall for the revived superhero series Daredevil.
City Hall was one of four location shoots in the greater New York area visited by WGA East picketers, according to a barrage of tweets from their strike captain, Warren Leight. Several dozen picketers responded and broke up into smaller groups — some with as few as two people carrying WGA picket signs outside a single doorway. Across the street from the local seat of government, about a dozen picketers walked a loop in the space between a catering truck and an equipment truck.