"Why do they hate us so?" In case one fails to appreciate my fine sense of irony, I hardly mean to single out blacks as a group, so much as an example. African American homophobia might be intense, but then any foil of racism would have to be. Indicative of just how far-reaching and systemic the problem is, a 30 day sentence for causing someone to feel they should end their young life, is pretty sobering. The truth is, we who are LGBT, have always been hated, even by our loved ones. As often as not, we have even hated ourselves and each other.
Take Donna. She was fabulous, we adored her, and while we grew up together, as our devotion made her rich, she loved us back. But then Donna Summer got religion. Careful to say she didn't hate us, that, "I pray for gays and lesbians to find forgiveness...", she also said she felt sorry for us. Of course, coming from her, our queen of the disco, her pity was far worse than hatred from others.
Now, just 63, she's gone. Why did Donna die so soon? How did she come to disdain our love? For people who seem to have it all, have we really any reason to envy their exalted position and material splendor? Sure, not having to worry about the basics of food, shelter, adequate health care, and an education, would be nice. But as for everything else that comes with being a Donna or a Mitt, in the long run, fame and fortune seem inevitably to carry a heart, mind and soul-numbing price.
It is mad that one should feel even some small sympathy for Governor Willard Mitt Romney and his youthful indiscrecions. But there it is, I do. And, this position is not due to my being an intolerant zealot either. If Governor Romney and many African Americans share a common contempt for lesbians and homosexuals, the apparent religious righteousness, widely reported to be the ultimate source of their motivation, is, at best, a flawed analysis.
Anti-gay biases of both Romney and blacks, ironically are inspired by the same base desire of all bullies: to elevate their own status and self-esteem by demenizing and reviling some conveniently weaker scapegoat.
Huey Newton explained it by stating,
“Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women (and I speak of the homosexuals and women as oppressed groups), we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion. I say ” whatever your insecurities are” because as we very well know, sometimes our first instinct is to want to hit a homosexual in the mouth, and want a woman to be quiet. We want to hit a homosexual in the mouth because we are afraid that we might be homosexual; and we want to hit the women or shut her up because we are afraid that she might castrate us, or take the nuts that we might not have to start with.”
How very enfeebled, how unsure and insecure one must feel to take delight in subjugating someone frailer still. So it was with the Nazis concerning gays, not to mention Jews, Gypsies, Jehovahs Witnesses, Free Masons and blacks. So too, the Ku Klux Klan regarded people of color, Jews and Roman Catholics as easy pickings to persecute. As mere interlopers in the promised land, widely derided by the media for antic veniality, we were all seen as largely friendless.
Today, with some Islamists, versus non-Muslims, gays and women, some Israelis, versus Palestinians, women and gays, nothing has changed. In the Middle East, in Africa, in Europe and even here, for them each of these marginalized groups comprises a weaker, deliberately disadvantaged class. So it is that behind a fig leaf of political history, cultural tradition and religious piety, oppression, is meeted out at will. It is often so pervasive as to even be embraced and internalized by its broken victims. To such tyrants, pursuits of justice and equality by vulnerable citizens among us is condemned as a threat to both societal stability, as well as to God’s continued favor.
It was with the impunity of crusaders that the 18-year-old, popular and richly privileged Mitt Romney, the son the governor of Michigan, led a band of marauding classmates at the exclusive Cranbrook School. They set out to avenge an affront to decency and manliness, personified by John Lauber. Sporting bleached-blond hair that draped louchely over one eye, the epicene youth revolted Romney, the man’s man, whose Mormon missionary great-grandfather had had a dozen wives. He and his gang were ruthless. “He can’t look like that!” Romney sneered, “ That’s wrong. Just look at him!”
Tackling their victim, sitting astride the slightly-built fey boy, the excited pack jeered as Romney cut his artificially golden tresses one, by one. Typical of 'sissies', his eyes filled with horror and tears, Lauber screamed for help, the same way Trayvon Martin did.
Now most African American North Carolinians would be loath to join such a mob, one chasing, tackling and giving a bad haircut to someone, just because they were gay. But voting overwhelmingly to amend their state’s constitution to deny marriage equality to same-sex couples, who commit to their communities and country by serving in battle and paying taxes just as they do, was no less heartless or harrowing.
“Why do they hate us so?”, several gay white friends have enquired of me since the vote. They are referring as well to a related measure, also passed with disproportionate black support in California a couple years ago. Apart from assigning to me the dubious responsibility of some African American oracle, a Sybil who must answer for the entire black race, my friends have responded as if I were somehow exempted from the ire of homophobic blacks.
Not one to shrink from a challenge, I’ve thought lots about their queries. I think I have always known I was gay. I certainly always knew being a sissy was considered contemptible. My conclusion that so many blacks abhor gays as a means of deflecting from our own near-universal detestation, is based in part, at least, on my own early behavior and responses to hate.
To curry favor with admired fellows, to throw off the scent of my own abhorrent identity, might I have joined Mitt in his anti-homo-high-jinks? I certainly demeaned Kim, whose family’s lovely terraced garden adjoined our backyard when I was first in elementary school. Kim’s father had died, leaving his family comfortably off. His mother and sister who adored their ‘little man’, felt he could do no wrong.
So unlike my house, surrounded by his mother’s polished mahogany furniture and English china, Kim and I could redecorate and play house to our hearts' content. When I was in the first and second grades, many a Saturday morning, between eating ice cream floats his sister made, watching cartoons on TV, or cutting flowers with Kim’s mother, that’s just what we did.
There were other boys who I had successfully persuaded to play house, demanding the superior role of wife and mother for myself. They had enjoyed it as much as I did, but such deviant pleasure worried them. Inevitably our game of house always occurred only once. Kim and I played house frequently and, taking turns as the husband and the wife, what an impeccable establishment we ran, too.
I have failed, so far, to mention Kim’s affected way of speaking, his graceful walk, animated gesturing, exaggerated expressions, extravagantly curled eyelashes and voluptuous lips. All of this, by turns, entranced and repulsed me. Physically strong, with rapier sharp repartee, even at 6, there was no ambiguity whatever as to Kim being homosexual.
This was why, to be acknowledged as Kim’s friend, one took a risk. When others where derisive about his speech and clever mannerisms, I ought to have spoken up. But I never did. There was even a time that I’d joined in with other boys, blithely degrading Kim. He was not one to suffer fools or foes lightly. How I had dreaded the thought of our next scheduled play-date. Yet, when next we met, as if by an unspoken agreement, neither of us mentioned the ugly incident of name-calling and laughing taunts on Diagonal Road across from Crouse School. When I was about to turn 10, we moved away from Bellevue Avenue. How relived, but alone, I’d felt.
Like lots of other African Americans, particularly so many African American people of faith and clergy, it was not boys interested in other boys that so distressed me. What had scared me into acting straight, of being heartlessly curel toward my friend, was his unabashed, out-loud-proud, in-living-color gayness. For guys like Kim, with no hope of refuge from passing as ‘normal’, their walk, talk and attitude always instantly gave away who they were. For them, the option of adopting the ideal of decorum among African Americans, “don’t ask, don’t tell”, was an impossibility.
The answer to my dilemma of being a self-loathing African American homosexual was certainly not derived from this initial course of acting straight and acting white, in hopes of becoming admirably acceptable. Rather, in the unlikely speech of the Black Panther Party’s founder, of August 15, 1970, the answer of being true to oneself is readily found, as plain as day.
I heard many older brothers during my youth who, ignorant of tribal grios, professed that homosexuality was a white perversion meant to debase black manhood. They insisted that sisters needed to patiently support their men in their struggle for black self-determination. But I never heard Huey Newton’s speech. Nor did I even read it until years and years after I’d come out in 1980. Fortunately its seminal message came to me just the same through other voices and from different works.
“We must gain security in ourselves and therefore have respect and feelings for all oppressed people. We must not use the racist attitude that the White racists use against our people because they are Black and poor. Many times the poorest White person is the most racist because he is afraid that he might lose something, or discover something that he does not have. So you’re some kind of a threat to him. This kind of psychology is in operation when we view oppressed people and we are angry with them because of their particular kind of behavior, or their particular kind of deviation from the established norm. That is not endorsing things in homosexuality that we wouldn’t view as revolutionary. But there is nothing to say that a homosexual cannot also be a revolutionary. And maybe I’m now injecting some of my prejudice by saying that “even a homosexual can be a revolutionary.” Quite the contrary, maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary.”
From what I knew of Kim, from what I later learned from drag queens after I’d come out, many of the most feminine and delicate-looking gays are, of necessity, the most fiercely brave and ‘revolutionary’! Coming to terms with my gay identity, admitting to being black and gay, doubly negative, was only gradually a liberating experience. Caught up in a moment of crisis, irresistibly attracted to a friend of a friend, I was hardly making an idle choice. Even amidst all the ferocity of my passionate yearning, I was loath to concede the safety of straightness. Already hated as a black, the second most-hated group in America, I was loathed to embrace my alienating sexuality that would place me squarely among those reviled most of all.
It’s having gone through all this, having a certain insight into what it’s like to be straight or white, as well as black and gay, that makes me more tolerant of intolerant black homophobes.
Every day, on any playground, one can readily find five-and six-year-olds swearing away. Yes, the word Nigger is employed as a term of approbation. To say ‘Yo my Nigga, what’s up?’, is as innocuous as saying “How do you do?” But how versatile the dreaded N-word is. Like Bitch, it may be used as a term of solidarity or even endearingly, but this hardly negates stinging, hurtful, hateful usage. As ever, it is the most venomous term possible, except that is, for faggot, queer, homo or especially “gay”.
What does it mean when an eight-year-old shouts, “You are gay and I’m going to put my dick in your ass!”? Surely it does not mean that his friend is literally homosexual but merely, that this is the worst slur that his friend can think of to hurl his way. It’s not unlike when young men address each other as Nigga, not in the collegial, friendly way, but as a damning insult of contempt suggesting, ‘don’t even try to pretend, like me, you are nothing but a low-down despised Nigger. No amount of wealth, prowess, beauty or attainment can change that, can make you somehow better than I am. You may talk or act white, but we are outcast equally.’
Calling someone gay, saying, ‘Nigga, youze a fag!’ also insulting, conveys, ‘not only are you outcast and low-down, but being gay, no amount of wealth, prowess, beauty or attainment, can ever make you other than much less than I am. I may be despised, but you, you are beyond the pale!’ That's why from Langston Hughes, to Malcolm X, to Eddie Long, blacks shudder to imagine that one of our avowed heros might be that way. 'Men messin with mens, that's nastey, don't talk about it! Femals? She just need a man, that's all.'
If one has the least doubt that assigning someone a homosexual identity constitutes the most damning condemnation possible, consider for a moment accusations leveled by various members of the lunatic fringe of the right wing at President Obama since his evolutionary endorsement of marriage equality. Mr. Paul Cameron of the Family Research Council bellicosely charges
“Well, the timing is I think miserable for his reelection. I would have expected him, as you did, to wait until he was the new president and say, "Guess what? I've changed my mind," or, "I've evolved." But homosexuality is the one sin, or the one habit, that is 24/7. It is homosexuality all the time. And actually, while I'm not sure about the claims by the various people who have reported that Obama has at least participated at times with them in homosexual acts, this certainly lends some credence.”
It hardly stops with President Obama. Whether it’s Hillary Rodham Clinton, Madeleine Albright or Condoleezza Rice, indeed any unapologetically powerful woman, Robert Kennedy or George Bush contending that such public figures are gay, is a favorite way of thoroughly discrediting all they have done or might do. As the worse transgression possible with which their detractors might attack them, in the 27 years I have lived in Harlem, I have heard every elected official and clergy member at work here, called out as “gay”.
Marriage, children, paramours, long years spent in the pulpit notwithstanding, some among this diverse group are indeed living on the deep DL. In a way one can hardly blame them either. If gays are greatly outnumbered by straights, if Johns outnumber prostitutes, then it only follows that fornication, rape and adultery are far more prevalent than homosexuality. Yet has one ever heard of a John or even a rapist being stoned to death? As to those who molest and sexually abuse children, every study shows that apart from priests, overwhelmingly, they are victims of men, men who profess to be heterosexual, their own fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins and family friends.
Due to shame and misplaced guilt, the vast majority of such crimes are never even reported, much less prosecuted and punished. And it’s true, pedophiles are detested more, more even than gays are. How regrettable then, that wrongly too often, the crime of child abuse is conflated with the condemnation of being homosexual.
For a few, like me, the cruelty of slavery, colonization, misogyny, homophobia and holocaust cast considerable doubt on the viability of an omnipotent higher being calling on us to love one another as ourselves, even to our enemies, and to love God, love incarnate, most of all. Thank goodness a mustard-seed-sized portion of custom, faith and irrational optimism enable one to hedge one's bets amidst doubts about what we can see versus unseen divinity.
Many others, though black, Jewish, women, or gays, refuse to allow their faith to be undermined by hate. They are convinced that categorical biblical condemnations of homosexuality are merely the self-serving misinterpretations, erroneous translations, or irrelevant historical context of ancient times, akin to Solomon’s 1,000 concubines and the faithfulness expected of slaves, dictated by insecure heterosexual men. They set much store by Jesus' teachings, which have nothing whatever to say about ‘mankind lying with mankind’. Some are equally impressed by a group of young men living together. It’s all Christ talk of love and compassion, his reservation of judgment for God and admonition that civil laws such as taxation or marriage not be confused with holy laws about feeding the poor or housing the homeless, that impresses them most.
It will probably never be sure for me. True enough, Christianity and Islam, were powerful tools by which my enslaved ancestors asserted worthiness and equality before God Almighty. Ironically though, both religions were, and are, readily used, and the Mormon faith as well, to justify illtreatment of those of us who who are accursed as abominate infidels. In any case, in the black church, which without gays and women would disappear, on black streets where gays are responsible for an abundance of whatever is creative or original, misogyny and gay-bashing persist. When will it change? Do the entreatments of President Obama or Jay-Z mark a new beginning? Surely at the dawn of a new century, it’s finally time that blacks stop using religion as an excuse to hate gays strategically.
As Huey Newton put it, “We must gain security in ourselves and therefore have respect and feelings for all oppressed people. We must not use the racist attitude that the White racists use against our people because they are Black and poor…”, or, because they are gay.
BREAK. IT. DOWN, MY BROTHA!
Posted by: Account Deleted | 05/16/2012 at 09:35 PM