The home as political landscape

For some Southern Californians, it’s time to pull candidates’ signs from the frontyard now that the June election has passed. But for an outspoken few, the campaign won’t end — not when lawns, windows and rooftops provide a place to make political or social statements all year round.

Pasadena residents Patrick Briggs and Maddie Gavel have a banner in front of their home that says, “Stand up & stop the corporate de$truction of America!” — just the latest in a years-long effort. The couple first fought for their right to express themselves on home turf in 2005. When the city forced them to remove a 6-by-8-foot banner protesting the Iraq war — it read, “Bush lied. People died” — Briggs and Gavel, with the ACLU — sued the city and won.

Since then, their signs have expressed any number of opinions, including protest of government wiretapping and support for healthcare reform.

“For us,” Briggs said, “it’s less about making some attention-getting statement and more about participating in community.”

And what about the community? Generally it has been supportive, he said, “though some people walk by and shout out protests. They’ll call us socialists.”

The couple received an anonymous death threat and had manure dumped on their lawn after they filed the lawsuit, but Briggs said protests of their protests have been rare.

“We live in a quiet neighborhood, and most people just keep to themselves, unfortunately,” he said. “I like the dialogue.”

ChadMichael Morrisette and his partner, Mito Aviles, both window dressers for Hollywood boutiques, never dreamed that hanging Sarah Palin in effigy from their roof would have elicited the neighborhood response that it did in October 2008. “We were just thinking of what truly frightened us, and at the time, Sarah Palin and John McCain fit the bill,” Morrisette said.

A mannequin representing the former Alaska governor and vice presidential nominee — decked out with a red thrift-store coat and a wig teased into a beehive — dangled from Morrisette and Aviles’ home for nearly three weeks with little reaction. It wasn’t until Keith Olbermann named Morrisette one of the worst people in the world for “promoting a spirit of violence” that the neighbors (and the rest of the country) tuned in.

West Hollywood City Hall received a tide of e-mails demanding that the effigy be taken down. Two days later, Jenny O’Donnell and Amanda Berry marched up to the home and, from the sidewalk, hoisted sheets on tent poles to cover what they had repeatedly asked their neighbors to remove.

“It was just tasteless,” O’Donnell said. “I believe in what they believe in politically. It’s just a violent way to say what you have to say. It’s counterproductive.”

More than 60 other people joined O’Donnell and Berry on the sidewalk. One protestor turned up with an effigy of Morrisette and a sign that read, “How does it feel, Chad?”

When West Hollywood Mayor Jeffrey Prang showed up, Aviles and Morrisette had had enough. “It was just supposed to be something frightening in the spirit of Halloween; it was never meant to upset that many people,” Morrisette said.

Since then, however, Morrisette and Aviles have decked out their place out with a super-Obama figure and an obscenity-heavy statement on Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage. The couple’s Halloween display last year included a representation of former Miss California Carrie Prejean, butchered and hanging off the side of the roof.

“You’d think they would have learned their lesson from last year,” O’Donnell said. “But when somebody’s tasteless, I guess you’re just not going to stop them from being tasteless.”

Which isn’t to say Aviles and Morrisette don’t have their fans. They have received honks of support from passing traffic and a plate of cookies from a neighbor. “It’s nice to have politically conscious people in the city of West Hollywood, where voters tend to be apathetic and voter turnout is just horrendous,” said Barbara Robertson, who lives nearby. “Besides, it’s their 1st Amendment right.”

Finding a way to connect to his community was the reason Joe Day, an architectural designer and professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, added a tickertape LED screen to his Silver Lake home. Day said the moving message board wasn’t so much built to broadcast his opinions but to connect an increasingly disconnected community. His interest: “How the private does occasionally become public, and how as an architect how you can break down those boundaries.”

At one point, his message board asked: “Any message you’d like to run?” Neighbors responded enthusiastically with requests for birthday tidings, quotes and song lyrics. Most of the messages, Day said, are inspirational, not political, like the E.B. White quote that recently crossed the tickertape: “Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.”

Sun Son has recruited his Pasadena neighbors to get across much more pointed messages. Just as in the old Burma Shave campaigns, Son used neighbors’ lawns to set up a sequence of signs that spelled out messages to passing motorists. As many as four houses on the block have contributed to his sequences, including the recent one that said: “Things will not change until we have publicly funded elections.”

“I consider myself somewhat powerless, but this was one thing that seemed quite obvious that I could do, especially if you have a captive audience of 20,000 people,” said Son, whose two-story Victorian sits close to an Interstate 210 off-ramp.

Son has his share of protestors and threats. He said he has called police on more than a few occasions. Signs often are stolen. But after one theft, Son responded in typical fashion: with a series that read, “You can steal the signs, but you can’t hide the truth.”

home@latimes.com