Julian Bond Speaks Out On AIDS, Gay Rights in Black Community

By Keith Boykin, in sexuality
Friday, August 18 2006, 4:24AM

I met him at a coffee shop in Washington, D.C. in the nineties. My friend Mario Cooper introduced us. He didn't know it, but I had briefly worked for his unsuccessful 1986 campaign for Congress when I lived in Atlanta. He was something of a hero to me even then. Ever since I read a 1970s book on the civil rights movement, I had always been impressed by Julian Bond.

Two years ago when I served as president of the National Black Justice Coalition, I contacted Bond to ask him his position on "same-sex marriage." He told me unequivocally that he supported it. Then earlier this year I learned that he had quietly decided not to attend the funeral service for Coretta Scott King, in part because he did not support the teachings of the controversial anti-gay presiding pastor, Bishop Eddie Long. There he goes again, I thought. Julian Bond is rarely afraid to do the right thing.

Although I never actually saw him during my two years teaching at American University, I was pleased to know that Bond was a part of the faculty in the AU School of Public Affairs. While I was stressed out teaching one class a semester, Bond managed to teach there and at the University of Virginia as well. And he was chairman of the board of the NAACP at the same time. I don't know how he has time to do it, but the man is a dynamo of energy. And this week I discovered that he's also a prolific writer.

Julian Bond On AIDS

Along with several other black leaders, Bond attended the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto this week in an effort to put AIDS in our community at the top of the national agenda. After he took a public HIV test at the NAACP Convention last month, he hasn't stopped encouraging others to be tested and involved too. In an op-ed piece published Monday in the Washington Post, Bond argues forcefully and convincingly that AIDS is increasingly becoming a black disease. Reflecting on the 25 years of the epidemic, Bond said black America was "lulled by media images that portrayed AIDS mainly as a white, gay disease." "We looked the other way," Bond said.

In Africa and in America, the new face of AIDS is primarily black, he says. Citing statistics that show the majority of new HIV infections in the U.S. are black, Bond wrote, "AIDS is now in our house. It's now our problem, and we must come up with solutions."

While describing the AIDS issue as "a major civil rights issue of our time," Bond says that "we cannot wait for the government to rescue us," and he proposes solutions. "Part of our response must be to eliminate the rabid homophobia that lives in our schools, our homes and, especially, our churches. Our inability to talk about sex, and more specifically homosexuality, is our greatest barrier to the prevention of HIV transmission."

Julian Bond on Gay Issues

It doesn't surprise me that Bond would take on the issue of homophobia in our communities. That's because he doesn't simply talk about homophobia in the context of AIDS. He talks about it in the broader context of what it's doing to our society as well.

That's right. In a completely separate editorial published in the Virginia Pilot on Wednesday, Bond takes up the cause of marriage equality for gays and lesbians. He cited the groundbreaking 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision that invalidated states laws against interracial marriage as a precedent for the LGBT marriage movement.

Civil rights are not special rights, he says. They are "shared by all." "It isn’t 'special' to be free from discrimination. It is an ordinary, universal entitlement of citizenship." Most importantly, Bond takes on the ridiculous right-wing argument that civil rights for gays and lesbians somehow diminishes the black experience in the civil rights movement. "When others gain a civil right, my rights are not reduced in any way," he writes. "Civil rights are a win/win game — the more won by others, the stronger the army defending my rights becomes."

Bond continues: "People of color ought to be flattered, however, that our movement has provided so much inspiration for others, and that our tactics, methods, heroines and heroes, even our songs, have been adopted by or served as models for others."

And he goes further than most black leaders in stating that sexual orientation is not a choice. "Sexual orientation parallels race," he says. "I was born black and had no choice. I couldn’t and wouldn’t change it if I could. Like race, our sexuality isn’t a preference — it is inborn, and the Constitution protects us all against discrimination based on immutable differences."

The parallels between the two movements for rights are not "exact," he tells black folk, "but we are far from the only people suffering discrimination. Others too deserve the law’s protections and civil rights." Bond notes that many gays and lesbians worked side by side with him in the 1960s civil rights movement.

"The lessons of the civil rights movement of yesterday, and the ongoing civil rights movement of today, is that sometimes the simplest of ordinary acts — taking a seat on a bus or a lunch counter, registering to vote, applying for a marriage license — can have extraordinary consequences," writes Bond. "They can change the way we act and think. They can change our world."

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