Reply #1: A black gay man asks: "Is Gay Marriage Anti-Black?" [View All]

[NorthernSpy]

I can see why some might like to believe that The Problem all boils down to black homophobia and black gays rejecting each other ("black on black racism"). But Kenyon Farrow sees it differently:

(...) I also think the white gay community’s supposed “understanding” of racism is what has caused them to appropriate language and ideology of the Black Civil Rights Movement, which has led to the bitter divide between the two communities. This is where I as a Black gay man, am forced to intervene in a debate that I find problematic on all sides.

Black Community and Gay Community – Natural Allies or Sworn Enemies?

As the gay community moved more to the right in the 1990’s, they also began to talk about Gay Rights as Civil Rights. Even today in this gay marriage debate, I have heard countless well-groomed, well-fed white gays and lesbians on TV referring to themselves as “second-class citizens.” Jason West, the white mayor of New Paltz, NY, who started marrying gay couples (to the dismay of New York Governor Pataki) was quoted as saying, “The same people who don’t want to see gays and lesbians get married are the same people who would have made Rosa Parks go to the back of the bus.” It’s these comparisons that piss Black people off. While the anger of Black heteros is sometimes expressed in ways that are in fact homophobic, the truth of the matter is that Black folks are tired of seeing other people hijack their shit for their own gains, and getting nothing in return. Black non-heteros share this anger of having our Blackness and Black political rhetoric and struggle stolen for other people’s gains. The hijacking of Rosa Parks for their campaigns clearly ignores the fact that white gays and lesbians who lived in Montgomery, AL and elsewhere probably gladly made many a Black person go to the back of the bus. James Baldwin wrote in his long essay “No Name in the Street” about how he was felt up by a white sheriff in a small southern town when on a visit during the civil rights era.

These comparisons of “Gay Civil Rights” as equal to “Black Civil Rights” really began in the early 1990’s, and largely responsible for this was Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and a few other mostly-white gay organizations. This push from HRC, without any visible Black leadership or tangible support from Black allies (straight and queer), to equate these movements did several things: 1) Piss off the Black community for the white gay movement’s cultural appropriation, and making the straight Black community question non-hetero Black people’s allegiances, resulting in our further isolation. 2) Giving the (white) Christian Right ammunition to build relationships with Black ministers to denounce gay rights from their pulpits based on the HRC’s cultural appropriation. 3) Create a scenario in their effort to go mainstream that equates gay and lesbian with upper-class and white. This meant that the only visibility of non-hetero poor people and people of color wound up on Jerry Springer, where non-heteros who are poor and of color are encouraged (and paid) to act out, and are therefore only represented as dishonest, violent, and pathological.

So, given this difficult history and problematic working relationship of the Black community and the gay community, how can the gay community now, at its most crucial hour, expect large scale support of same-sex marriage by the Black community when there has been no real work done to build strategic allies with us? A new coalition has formed of Black people, non-hetero and hetero, to promote same-sex marriage equality to the Black community, and I assume to effectively bridge that disconnect, and to in effect, say that gay marriage ain’t just a white thing. Or is it?

More at http://kenyonfarrow.com/2005/06/14/is-gay-marriage-anti-black/