One acquaintance laughed, "You are always swishing in a parade because you are one real queen!" An older and wiser friend has said, "One definition of being gay is an irresistible attraction to the unobtainable!" Giving credence to both notions is the elusive, but ever more compelling desire I, and others who are gay have, to be ourselves, out-loud proud and unashamed.
For me, self-discovery and acceptance have been an interesting if sometimes arduous journey, made along a circuitous route as unpredictable as Langston Hughes' perilous staircase. Even after my first boyfriend, an alcoholic interior decorator in Shaker Heights, broke up by informing me, "I can't be with you anymore, my white friends don't understand.", I still pursued young blonds who were mostly unresponsive. My second boyfriend, black, seeing me with my first, resolved, he said, 'to take me away from that white man.' Working at Mr. Henry's, Cleveland's most popular black gay bar, seeking a third boyfriend I still went out on my night off looking for white boys.
Concentrating on my work, I never gave a second glance to patrons eager to buy me drinks. The situation was not so different from the blue-eyed beauties I vainly asked to dance. But what was it about the man from L. A. that manifested an epiphany, enabling me to see beauty I'd refused to see before? He was tall, dark, slender, but muscled and lovely; a bus driver. He ignited a spark. I would never dismiss black men again, realizing in an instant, that the same forces that made me not want to be gay were the same forces that had made me not want to be black!'
I'd learned about some of those powerful forces in a Middle Eastern Cultural Traditions course, studying the three great monotheistic faiths originating in the valley at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates. That class had been transformative too. It outlined how more than anything else, the Abrahamic religions share disdain for women and gays and contempt for non-believers so great, that it is convert, or else.
Among close friends and my lesbian sister I acknowledged being gay for a year before coming out to my parents. Although we held a reverence for history, I was an aesthete and my father was a jock. So my dad and I, forever dissapointed that one did not embrace enthusiasms loved by the other, were frequently at odds, hurting each other over and over again. Mom and I appreciated plenty of interests in common. We both loved flowers, good food, pretty clothes and making each other laugh. My folk's role reversal, that blustery morning, was what was hardest to take. We were conferring in their room, with the door closed, something that had never occurred before. After a series of false starts, to avoid chickening out yet again, I'd mailed mom and dad a confessional letter. Because they still hadn't replied after four days, I'd used a sudden blizzard as an excuse to venture the blocks from my basement apartment 'to help shovel snow at home.' My usually distant dad had started, noting,
"Well, as you suggest in your letter son, there's very little in life that's ever really secret. I guess we've always known... But I hope you know, that knowing, your mother and I don't love you any less now than we always have..."
This was the most wonderful thing my father would ever say to me. It was delivered with a directness and honesty that made it clear that he believed what he was saying. But it's an indication of just how tenuous and combative my relationship usually was with my father, that my immediate response to this dramatic announcement was to wonder to myself in silence, 'Really, just how much is that?'
I knew better of course than to give voice to any question of the sincerity of dad's affection. Whereas, with my mom, I was stung. What she said made it seem that she didn't love me, just as I was. But the depth and duration of our intimacy was such that I had no hesitation whatever in challenging her logic. I addressed her suggestion that with divine intervention, I might fix myself, with:
"I have prayed, for twenty-five years I've asked God to help me, and I'm still black, I'm still poor and I'm still gay!"
The other day recalling all this I wondered besides, 'Why aren't the people trying to change or control those of us who are different, heterosexuals, whites, whatever, not better able to empathize, to understand that all we want is what they already expect and enjoy: mostly, love and freedom? What possibly is ever the compelling public purpose of discrimination? Whether directed against blacks or gays, whomever, discrimination amounts to nothing more than a means of maintaining oppressive authority.' This was the preamble to my communal rejoicing, thinking, ‘ Hooray!’ At last the spurious ‘Defense of Marriage Act’ has been overturned. However distressed I felt due to the Supreme Court's ill-advised evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, like all right-thinking people I rejoiced nonetheless.
I had marched here three times before making my big move to Harlem late in the summer of 1985. So Sunday, June 30th, marked my thirtieth New York City Gay Pride Parade. It’s always an exhilarating experience, joining an exuberant throng of hundreds of thousands celebrating self-assertion. A decade ago I hit on the idea of tossing roses to spectators as I make my progress. Done with the help of friends, distributing floral tokens of affection is a wonderful way to engage with fellow revelers, who always seem about as pleased with a rose as if it were a gold coin.
But oddly enough, as anyone living in New York knows, even in the middle of a multitude one can still be alone. Certainly promenading and throwing flowers left lots of time to think, to consider and analyze some of the momentous pronouncements that made this year's march bigger than ever before.
Such weighty stuff naturally was bound to be interspersed with some froth, observations of mine amounting to a preoccupation, such as: ‘What an adorable child!, I don’t remember that fine old Federal house being here before?,' or, ‘How cute is that one, over there!’ But prevailing hoopla, infusing almost everyone and then overhearing a young man who'd just gotten married, exclaim of himself and his partner, 'Free at last! Free at Last! Thank God almighty, we're free at last!', the entire overheated atmosphere, it all brought me around.
'How?' I mused, while smiling at the cheering, jubilant, rainbow flag bedecked and waving mob, 'How did we ever get here? How are some able to downplay the slap-in-the-face setback to people of color, to witness dismemberment of the Voting Rights Act, unmoved and to march exultant, only concerned with a great leap forward for gays? How have so many arrived at feeling that the civil rights of blacks are so far less pressing today than what seem to me to be the far less critical travails of the LGB and T’?'
Those were the lines along which my wondering went, leaving me feeling a little alone in a crowd overjoyed with the downfall of 'DOMA'.
A similar decision handed down by the Court a short forty-six years ago, June 12, 1967, when I was an inquisitive eleven-year-old, dismissed the Commonwealth of Virginia's prohibition against whites or blacks marrying persons of another race. Hearing the aptly named Virginia v Loving, the High Court then ruled citing a quite different section of our Bill of Rights, both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Chief Justice Earl Warren's opinion for a unanimous Court held that:
Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man, [read humankind] fundamental to our very existence and survival...To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.
Understandably enough the Court concluded that racist anti-miscegenation laws had been enacted to perpetuate white supremacy:
There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose, independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain white supremacy.
With the example of this shining precedent, why was hateful heterosexual superiority not dispatched as readily as white supremacy? Moreover, why now is the Court's confrontation and dismissal of bigotry no longer universal, but decided only with the narrowest majority?
Even worried about growing efforts to suppress the political power of 'minorities', unavoidably, I joined in applauding the defeat of Proposition Eight and 'DOMA'. Yet for all the real hardship gays may undergo here, I for one, do not feel our suffering is analogous to the enduring woe faced by blacks. No, in America, no matter what Bayard Rustin or Coretta Scott King might have said in response to apathy about our raging HIV/AIDS epidemic, 'gay' is not the 'new black'!
_
Of course, there is a caveat. Outside of America, outside of the West, an open gay life can be an assured death sentence. No sane person would wish to be born in places were gay delirium amounts to a national sport.
No one ought imagine that I, black and gay, a ‘double negative’, I used to feel, trivialize in any way the hate, attack and murder, endemic to American gays of late, even in New York. Gay bias today is indeed sometimes quite grim. The brazen shooting of 32-year-old Marc Carson in the heart of gay Greenwich Village, early in the morning on May 18th, however horrendous, was nothing unique. Before, and since, a score of gays have been attacked and even slain. Back around 2002, for instance, three gay homeless African American teenagers were killed in Harlem; their deaths are still unsolved. In 2008, in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, Ecuadorian immigrant brothers, Jose and Romel Sucuzhanay, heterosexual, but walking arm in arm, following a night on the town, were brutally attacked by three tall black youths. Hurling a barrage of ethnic and anti-gay abuse, the black men also wielded against their defenseless victims an aluminum bat and a broken beer bottle. As a result of this assault, Jose Sucuzhanay was declared brain-dead and then died. His murderers who were charged with 'manslaughter', claimed that their victims had disrespected their car, by kicking a wheel after they were insulted.
Those were some interesting times back at the close of the Bush era. This was a moment when so much seemed lost, with so much at stake, that the people of the United States made history, electing Barack Obama, as our first African American president. In the same election, in 'liberal' California, blacks voted disproportionately to support a ballot imitative meant to curtail the civil rights of fellow citizens. Through the infamous Proposition Eight, the perilous struggle for human dignity and mutual respect was recklessly prolonged.
Such incidents, the murder of brothers, mistakenly id-ed as gay, sensational and violent, and the mundanely political, latest California ballot initiative, were but the two sides of the same coin. Like torture and terrorism, the one the cause of the other, they are insuperable incidents of ignorance and intolerance.
If ignorance is a key problem, the solution is a hard one. Just pass by any playground and you're sure to hear why. How pervasively the taunt of, "faggot" or "gay" is applied, by even the littlest kids, to each other, along with 'nigga' in black neighborhoods, as the most contemptuous terms they know. Moreover, out of fear, not of stupidly, but of "acting white", of appearing effeminate, of isolation, many boys reject education altogether as a stigmatizing burden.
Black Californians were not motivated solely out of mean-spiritedness or hate, no more than the European capitalists of long ago who sold Africans into slavery, or Germans who persecuted Jews. Now, as in the past, most people in search of a scapegoat usually feel a large measure of righteously indignant justification of the kind that fosters anti-gay hysteria in Africa, the Levant, Eastern Europe, Russia and Asia.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the esteemed Director of the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in his excellent book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, carefully explains the plight of how African Americans, following slavery, came to be demonized as the locus of laziness and criminality. Eugenics, criminal justice training and laws based on skewed scholarship: every apparatus of public and private policy, were marshaled in the effort of making black people into the very embodiment of what it was to be the outlaw 'other'. As a mythic pathology of black failure in the “land of plenty” arose, much as in Nazi Germany, the very conditions resulting from persecution were deemed as justification for added ill treatment. Prodigious arrests and imprisonment, disproportionate rates of disease, poverty, unemployment, a lack academic attainment, the very symptoms of odious and unrelenting repression, were interpreted by many whites, even by some blacks, as proof positive of black inferiority. The inability of blacks to assimilate and succeed, the very dream we were bared pursuing, became a cautionary tale about the dire threat blacks posed to American society, a detriment of doom more than justifying separatism, fear and loathing.
David Wilson
James Baldwin
Edward Perry
Gladys Bently, Bobby Short, Billy Strayhorn, Bricktop and Claude Marchant
In days past, black gays and lesbians spent as much effort evincing excellence, to belie negative stereotypes, as they did obscuring their true identity from a hostile world.
Historically, condemned as members of a criminal class, those voting for Proposition Eight felt moved by 'virtue'. Exhibiting one’s own piety through an attack on reviled reprobates, was hardly difficult for people whose ancestors appropriated the foreign religion used as a means of their enslavement. Christianity became a tool that African Americans turned into a powerful liberation movement. Striking out at a group even more despised than blacks, black voters in the 'Sunshine State' wounded gays and lesbians in a critical way that avoiding blood and gore, could blithely be categorized as Christian.
"Gays," Colin Powell insisted until rather recently, for instance, "wrongly try to compare themselves to blacks. Their mistake is that we don't choose the color of our skin," he said. Clergy, like the Reverend Floyd Flake, have similarly denounced the "immorality of homosexuality," as comparable to the irrationality of "intentionally eating out of the toilet bowl."
With such arguments, often eerily reminiscent of old rationales for black oppression, gays and lesbians certainly are widely under attack, seemingly by all and sundry, but particularly from blacks offended that oppression links us. This hounding of homosexuals, a backlash against ever greater gay liberation, includes many people who ought to know better. Professing Christians would do well to recall how their own first adherents were also routinely and casually crucified for an unpopular and nonconforming identity.
The problem eternally besetting blacks, is our perennial inability to pass. Even long-loathed gays, now that AIDS is better under control, what with gay marriages, designer gaybys, highly respected, well-paying professions and excess disposable incomes, do a better job at assimilation than we, the darker brother, eternally angry and feared. Now I know this is merely a skewed characterization offered of my gay tribe. Certainly there is only the smallest participation of the gay gentry who summer at Fire Island, P-Town and the Hamptons at any gay rally or march. And one has only to attend a gay pride celebration like New York's, to appreciate the true rainbow-like diversity, in terms of ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, role-playing and social class, that America's gay community actually represents.
But the perception of a well-off, fastidious and fabulous gay populous persists. Broke Back Mountain was one break-through, suggesting that gay men were not necessarily easily detected nelly queens, that some gays, look like straight movie stars. The Will and Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Ellen, Anderson Cooper, John Lemon-inspired notion of gayness, emerging of late, is as new as it is ill-informed. But then so is the Cosby Show, Oprah Winfrey, Collin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Williams Sisters, Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson, Clarence Thomas, Beyoncé, Kanye West vision of black transcendence and triumph. It was encapsulated by the election of Obama, that focal figure of America's post-racial deliverance.
The always eloquent John Lemon
This, too, to be sure is, it's impossible to say otherwise accurately, is plain BS. As evidence, one may take one’s pick. It's hard to say which example is more deplorable, George Zimmerman's hunting down, then self-righteously executing unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin, or New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who sanguinely justifies the more than one million men stopped and frisked over the past two years. Ninety percent were black and Latino, but not, the mayor says, on account of racial profiling. "I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.", says he. The rationale for this contention, approving an even more draconian intervention among young men of color? His Honor explains it's because, "A disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the murder are minorities."
"And that is the thing about American holidays: All too frequently they misdirect the focus and confuse the narrative, so that the villains are seen as benevolent and the victims are seen as the aggressors. Thanksgiving, the day that the nation memorializes the genocide of Natives, while giving thanks for generations of wealth built on the plunder of their lands, is a case in point"
Hear, hear! In exactly the same way, Mayor Bloomberg and New York's Finest are cheered by many for keeping us safe. But what's likely to be made clear through pending judicial findings, is that not only have fewer than ten percent of the millions stopped to date, been at fault, but that even the guilty, the majority of whom were charged with possession of small amounts of marajuna, as opposed to firearms, have themselves been crime victims! To stop and search someone without cause, except that they are black, male and young, even if some, or even were most crimes committed by black male youth, violates the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution! Were whites stopped in the vicinity of Wall Street, think of the insider trading and cocaine bust ! Yet Whites stoped in such numbers, or even at a proportionate rate, would cause such an outrage, that the Stop-and-Frisk policy would be suspended overnight.
And what if a black man had followed, hounded and shot dead a white teenager? Inasmuch as George Zimmerman is white, and Trayvon Martin was black, some are able to suspend disbelief, and imagine the one as vigilant, a good neighbor who stood his ground, defending his community and life. Trayvon is easily viewed as a terrifying suspect, who was killed through some awful accident. Were the races of these two reversed, who would not see Zimmerman, as Trayvon, terrified and screaming did, as a manic and menacing 'creep', cruising him or otherwise up to no good?
About a year ago my ailing father died. We were never as story-book close as we might have liked to be. But thanks to our mutual devotion to history and justice, we remained connected until the last. Dad was sure that my forthcoming gay and lesbian history, Homo Harlem, would turn out to be a best seller.
My mother took great offense that I had ever prayed not to be black. For me, I tried to tell her, that though I loved watermelon, fried chicken, Diana Washington and her just as much as always, I also wanted an easier, happier, more rewarding life. Because she is a Christian who believes salvation and eternal life incumbent on following the word of God, including prohibitions condemning being gay, because she is heterosexual, twenty-two years ago, my mother couldn't accept who I am. But my mother loves me, as well as Jesus, who said;
Little children, yet a little while I am with you. Ye shall seek me: and as I said unto the Jews, Whither I go, ye cannot come; so now I say to you. A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. John 13:33-35
So over the years, my mom though no less devout, has gown more empathetic. For me, still black, still poor and still gay and for others like me, I hope that one day, that all the world becomes more like my mom.
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