Pride In The City

By Keith Boykin, in sexuality
Friday, August 5 2005, 11:11AM

For New York's black gay and lesbian community, this is one of the biggest weekends of the year. This weekend is New York's Pride In The City, sponsored by People of Color in Crisis. It's a long hot weekend of parties, picnics, forums, films, concerts, cruises and beaches.

This year the weekend kicks off when the biennial Black Gay Research Group summit. I spoke at the summit yesterday morning about the challenges and opportunities for the black gay community. Here now are excerpts from my remarks.

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Excerpts From Remarks By Keith Boykin
At The 2005 Black Gay Research Summit
Brooklyn, New York
August 4, 2005

The recent down low discussion is just a part of a larger social, political and cultural discussion going on about race and sexuality. I taught political science for several years at American University in Washington and never once had a single black male student in any of my classes. I had black women, Latino men, and white men, but no black men. On that one campus, black men are becoming an endangered specie.

But we also have to see the big picture. Donnie McClurkin uses gospel music, Beenie Man uses dance hall music, and the government of Iran uses an old-fashioned noose to enforce its repression. The world is afraid of men who love other men, and America is no different. Marlon Riggs said black men loving black men is a revolutionary act. And so from New York to Los Angeles, black men are under assault. And of course, black gay men are very much under assault.

In Los Angeles, author Terry McMillan discovers her husband is gay and now she is pushing for a new law to ban married men from sleeping with other men.

In Washington, Rev. Willie Wilson of Union Temple Church suggested last month that black women are becoming lesbians because they are making more money than their male counterparts, and he argued that "lesbianism is about to take over our community."

In Chicago, Rev. Gregory Daniels, a black minister, announces that he would march with the Ku Klux Klan if they were marching against gays and lesbians.

In Atlanta, Bishop Eddie Long at the 25,000-member New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, leads a march against gay marriage that begins at The Martin Luther King Jr. Center, a slap in the face to Dr. King’s legacy.

In Miami, Arthur Teele, an African American and former Miami city commissioner, put a gun to his head and killed himself last week after a local newspaper reported that he had a gay affair.

In Tampa, a young black father killed his son, little Ronnie Paris, by punching him to death to rough him up out of fear that the 3-year-old boy might be a “sissy.”

In San Francisco, the Human Rights Commission finds that the Badlands gay nightclub in the Castro openly discriminates against black patrons, refusing to allow them to enter unless they produce multiple forms of ID and can show proof that they can pay for drinks once they enter.

In Pennsylvania, Robert Traynham, a black gay man, is outed by the gay press because he works as a top aide for one of the most homophobic Senators in our country, U.S. Senator Rick Santorum. “The only time I think about being an African-American is when I get up in the morning to shave, when I look in the mirror,” Traynham said recently.

From West Virginia to Westchester, black lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people are being beaten and killed. Arthur Warren, Wanda Alston, Rashawn Brazell, Sakia Gunn, Jamal James, Dwan Prince and Nizah Morris are just some of the names of the victims we know. I remember the moment I heard the news about my friend Wanda Alston. I was at a book signing at a friend's house in St. Louis when the call came through on my cell phone. Wanda had been murdered in her own home. And of course I remember 15-year-old Sakia Gunn. I sat for hours in Sakia's living room as her heartbroken mother and grandmother recounted the whole sad story of her murder.

The sad part is not just that all this is happening. The sad part is that nobody seems to care.

When asked a question about HIV policy at the debate last year, the Vice President of the United States did not even realize that AIDS is still a crisis in black America. Our leaders do not have the time to save the lives of black Americans, and yet the president of the United States can fly back to Washington, D.C. from his ranch in Crawford to “save” the life of a brain dead white woman in Florida. We can’t find the money to fight the AIDS epidemic among black people, but the U.S. military can provide helicopters to track down a missing white girl in Aruba.

Maybe they just don’t care about us. The Daily Show’s Rob Corddry put it best a few days ago when he said, the president just doesn’t give a fuck. When questioned by reporters last week, the leader of our country simply walked away and flipped them the finger. The spin doctors quickly tried to play it off and claimed that the hand gesture was a misidentified thumbs up, but either way, it was an act of unmitigated arrogance from a dangerous leader with unbridled egotism and unprecedented power.

But Karl Rove and the right-wing decisionmakers in the White House are not content to ignore us. They hope to exploit us, and so they have co-opted conservative black clergy in an unholy alliance to drive a wedge between two progressive constituencies instead of building their own base within these communities. And yet many of our pastors are all-too-willing conspirators in this transparent GOP ploy to siphon off black votes.

The lesson from the last election is that “visibility does not equal understanding,” says Urvashi Vaid, a longtime gay activist who urges LGBT leaders to see beyond identity politics. She’s right, of course, but in the black LGBT community, we don’t even have much visibility. But for all the visibility of the white LGBT community, what is there to show for it? Queer Eye for the Straight Guy? Will and Grace?

Look around you. It’s 2005. It’s been 140 years since slavery, 51 years since Brown v. Board, 41 years since the Civil Rights Act, 40 years since the Voting Rights Act, 36 years since Stonewall, 24 years since the AIDS epidemic, and we are still not saved. One political party controls the White House, the Congress and the Supreme Court, and the rest of us are fighting just to hold the line. We’ve had 4 national gay and lesbian marches on Washington in the past 30 years, and not a single major piece of pro-gay legislation has been passed in Congress. We’ve marched for the 20th, 30th and 40th anniversary of Dr. King’s famous 1963 March on Washington, and yet we still have to fight just to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act. We brought a million black men to Washington 10 years ago and not a single new federal law came out of it.

Don’t get me wrong. We’ve made many strides in the past few decades. When I worked for the Dukakis for President campaign back in 1988, Mike Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, would not even mention the word “gay” in a speech. By 1992, all the Democratic presidential candidates were vying for the gay vote and the gay dollar, and every single candidate vowed to lift the ban on gays in the military. That change took place in just 4 years. But other change is also underway.

Black religious leaders from Rev. Jeremiah Wright to Archbishop Desmond Tutu have expressed their support for the LGBT struggle. Political leaders like Al Sharpton, John Lewis, and Carol Moseley Braun have endorsed marriage equality. Civil rights leaders like Coretta Scott King, Julian Bond and Joseph Lowery have become our allies. And academics like Michael Eric Dyson, Henry Louis Gates and Cornel West have joined the cause.

In popular culture, the change is astounding. From Six Feet Under to The Real World to The Wire, a few representations of black gay men are finally becoming visible in the media. More importantly, black same-gender-loving men and women have begun to empower themselves. Black men and women like Ron Oden, Ken Reeves, Sabrina Sojourner, Peggy Moore and Jass Stewart have run for office as openly gay and lesbian candidates. Black gay films like The Ski Trip, The Reception and Brother to Brother have told our stories on the big screen. And new black gay TV series like Noah’s Arc, The Closet and Herndon Davis Reports will tell our stories on television. In fact, a year ago this very week, my partner Nathan and I became the first black gay couple on television when we appeared as cast members of the 10 episode Showtime television series American Candidate.

Across the country, a burgeoning Black Gay and Lesbian Pride Movement has brought out tens of thousands of black gay men and lesbians to celebrate their identity. Hundreds of interconnected black LGBT web blogs have created an extraordinary organizing tool to identify and mobilize our community on the Internet. And for the first time in a decade, we have a strong new national voice in the National Black Justice Coalition, the only national black LGBT civil rights organization.

In fact, next month, the Coalition will bring together more than 100 black LGBT leaders from all across the country for an unprecedented community leadership summit. For the first time in my memory, black gay and lesbian leaders will be able to sit down in one room and figure out an agenda and develop a plan to achieve it.

But there are challenges ahead. Yesterday I had breakfast with a consultant from the Gill Foundation and he asked me what are the biggest challenges to black LGBT organizing. I gave him two. The first, I said, is religion. And the second is capital.

I am convinced that religion is the biggest barrier to black LGBT acceptance of ourselves. Even those of us who are not religious are often deeply influenced and affected by the black church. Before we can do anything else to uplift our community, we must first give our people the tools to deconstruct the religious barriers in their own lives.

Last November, Bishop Noel Jones of Los Angeles traveled to Jamaica to tell the Jamaican people not to bow to pressure from American gay rights activists to change their anti-gay laws. Jones, a wealthy, unmarried 54-year-old minister is the brother of legendary singer Grace Jones. He is one of the hundreds of anti-gay ministers in the black community. And yet every week, black gay men and women line up at these homophobic churches to get our weekly beatdown.

We come because, although the black church is the most homophobic institution in the black community, it is also the most homo-tolerant. The homophobia emanates from the pulpit on any given Sunday. But if you look behind the pulpit to the choir members, the music directors, the organists, the ushers, and the deacons, you will see that black gay men are everywhere in the church. Too many of our churches still subscribe to the policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

One significant way in which researchers can play a valuable role in this issue is by challenging the black nationalist Christian mythology that argues that homosexuality is sinful and deviant and was not indigenous to pre-colonial Africa. It’s time to fight the religious bigots with facts instead of fear.

The second major challenge for black LGBT organizing, I told the consultant, is the disconnect between capital and consciousness in our community. That is to say that those with capital often lack consciousness and those with consciousness often lack capital. Our challenge is to connect the two.

Similarly, perhaps the biggest challenge facing black gay researchers is the potential disconnect between theory and practice. Because many of our researchers are very involved with their communities, there has been an ongoing attempt to make these connections. And so the challenge for black gay researchers is broad but important. We must find ways to make our work meaningful not just in the classroom, but also in the board room, in the court room, in the living room, and of course, in the bedroom.

That is not to say that we should avoid thinking for the purpose of thinking. But there is a great deal of practical work that needs to be done that only researchers can do. We need research on who we are as black gay people. We need to know basic demographics about our community, its size, and the interests of our people. We need to know what obstacles prevent the people in our community from self-acceptance or healthy behavior, and we need to know what stimuli and incentives will move them toward self-acceptance and healthy behavior.

Of course, researchers can also encourage people to think. How many times have you heard misinformation about black gays and lesbians on the radio, or seen it on television, or read it in the newspaper? Much of this information is based on the lack of critical thinking. Fortunately, many of you are on already inspiring a generation of young people to become critical thinkers.

But there is more. The National Black Justice Coalition recently co-published a study on black same-sex households. It is just preliminary information, but the study and the raw data can be mined for further investigation and information. We can dig deeper and explore more fully issues around military service, child rearing, church attendance, and family acceptance. And by exploring these issues, we can better serve our community by better understanding their needs.

With every step forward, however, it sometimes seems we take two steps back. Back in February, I stood next to Minister Louis Farrakhan at a press conference when he promised that the 10th anniversary observance of the Million Man March would be much more inclusive than the original all-male event 10 years ago. “Male, female, gay, straight, light, dark, rich, poor, ignorant, wise” are all welcome, Farrakhan said. “We are family. We will be coming together to discuss family business.”

After his remarks, I approached the minister and introduced myself. “Minister Farrakhan,” I said, while shaking his hand, “My name is Keith Boykin, and I am a black gay man. And I want to thank you for your inclusive comments about gays in the Million Man March.” Without missing a beat, Farrakhan responded to me with a long, warm embrace. “Brother, I love you,” he said as we hugged. “We are all part of the family.”

Five months later, Rev. Willie Wilson, the executive director of the Million Man March 10th anniversary, told his church, "When you get down to this thing, women falling down on another woman, strapping yourself up with something, it ain’t real. That thing ain’t got no feeling in it. It ain’t natural…Any time somebody got to slap some grease on your behind, and stick something in you, it’s something wrong with that. Your butt ain’t made for that."

Ten years ago, I was a part of a contingent of 200-300 black gay men in the first Million Man March. At that time, another black minister, Rev. George Stallings, founder of the African American Catholic Congregation, provoked a controversy when he defended Louis Farrakhan from charges of homophobia by arguing that the Nation of Islam leader would be better than “some milquetoast sissyfaggot to lead you to the promised land.”

Back then, black gay men held a pre-march rally in downtown Washington and then we marched through the streets of the capital on our way down to the Mall. A few passers-by moved out of the way, two people driving their cars along the adjoining streets honked their horns in support and a number of pedestrians stopped and stared. But there was virtually no negative reaction even as we chanted: "We're black! We're gay! We wouldn't have it any other way!"

The lesson of that experience is that when we have the courage to be open and honest about who we are, our community not only accept us, they respect us more. As Audre Lorde said, “When I dare to be powerful — to use my strength in the service of my vision — then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” We don’t have to be fearless, but we do have to act. It doesn’t matter if we are afraid as long as we do not let our fears paralyze us from what we must do.

Last November, I met a young black gay man named Mark Smith at a conference in St. Louis. Mark is a 17-year-old junior at Hazelwood East High School who, on his own, decided to start a gay-straight alliance at his mostly black high school. Then a few months ago, I spoke at the annual career day for the Harvey Milk School, a gay school here in New York City. I was shocked to discover that almost all the students who came to the career day were black or Latino. In fact, most of the students in the school are black or Latino.

It takes courage for young people like Mark and others to stand up and be who they are. And sometimes it takes courage for adults to stand up and be who they are as well. So today I want to encourage you to move beyond your own fears in the work that you do. You may be afraid of what your colleagues will say, or what the tenure review committee will say, or even what your students will say. But don’t let this fear paralyze you.

The world is depending on us to do this work. Our communities are depending on us. And more specifically, black gay men are depending on us. We cannot afford to let them down.

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