Where Is Our Martin Luther King?

[ruggerson]

Most civil rights and/or emancipation movements have had long lists of heroes. Individuals who dedicated their lives to fighting the good fight, many of them becoming familiar household names to many Americans in the process.

Martin Luther King. Malcolm X. In an earlier era, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.

Suffrage fighters included Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

The gay rights movement has suffered from an astounding lack of impassioned, effective leaders. Harvey Milk became a local icon in San Francisco in the 70's, but his fame and impact have been enlarged primarily through his martyrdom and untimely death. There have been a few gay Congressmen, Barney Frank, Gerry Studds, Steve Gunderson, but their focus was, as it should be, on their districts and their constituents concerns, not primarily on equal rights for gay and lesbian citizens. There have been occasional artist/agitators like Larry Kramer, but they have been marginalized by some of their more outrageous positions and their desire to be gadflys more than actual leaders.

Our national groups, the NGLTF and the Human Rights Campaign, lobby quietly behind the scenes and do virtually no public relations at all. When is the last commercial you saw running nationally that countered some of the lies the religious rightwing spews forth on a daily basis?

Where are the men and women to lead us? WHere are the men and women who can command a public stage to boldly and courageously argue our position and make our case?

Where are our Martin Luther Kings and Malcolm X's? Where are our Huey Newtons and Bobby Seals and Gloria Steinems and Betty Friedans?

Why do we have virtually no leaders at all?

[xchrom]

1. sigh -- gay folk are not a group like other groups.

we don't bring our parents with us.

for the most part each and every one of us come into the gay universe on our own -- without ''family'' history -- without uncles and aunts -- without a history -- except what we learn of gay history once we get there.

we are more than any other minority -- a group of individuals.

martin luther king jr -- or insert name of ''leader here'' of minority group -- had the advantage of a minority in with all of the advantages of family and history that as a group we don't have.

the oppression is the same -- but the groups are different -- and this is important -- and wonderful.

every struggle for equality is different and unique and this is one the markers that ours unique.

[Fovea]

2. Gays can 'pass' in society

with greater ease. Of course, this makes the phobia associated with gayness more severe, as minorities can be more easily identifed in many cases.

I was talking to a Democratic neighbor and labor official a while back, and he said-- I wish we Dems could just get rid of the gay marriage issue. Not because I am against gays, or even gays marrying, but because it is such a blunt club we get beaten with (or something very close to that).

I said that I thought Equal Marriage, Habeus Corpus, Equal Education, Progressive Taxation, and Collective Bargaining all represented the same concept in society-- justice.
I told him that we should be happy that we are fighting for Equal Marriage, because when we smack that baby into place, the religious right will have no argument that isn't a reductio, ad absurdum left(you can already see the first consequenses of this in the 'war on Christmas'). This represents the core fear on which other fears of the unidentifiable other are based. (It is like pot laws as a system of social control, make a person believe an absurdity and you can make them commit an attrocity, and all that).

I then told him my shameful secret, that as a Wiccan priest, I had performed Handfasting ceremonies for numerous gay and lesbian couples, and fully intend to perform legal marriages when America catches up to reality. I mentioned how I watched someone I had handfasted support his spouse thoughout a long illness and death with a lot more love and compassion than say, Newt Gingrich, and that I would gladly go to the wall to protect the sanctity of a love that strong. There is nothing more powerful, gentle, and sacrosanct than love.

This fellow is not a freeper, but a well educated, progressive man in his 50s. He and I are in complete agreement on such issues as corruption, universal healthcare education, etc-- but for him, a staunch pro choice Catholic, the image of drag queens and the altar was initially just too much. I told him that regardless of dress, I would refuse to perform a ceremony that mocked the sanctity of marriage. I think he accepted my point by the time we were done, though I think he had to re-asess me a bit. It's ok, we have been through a lot in this little neighborhood in the past 10 years or so. We are both fighting our own fight to make Kansas blue.
I am not sure he's a strong Equal Marriage supporter yet, but I believe he sees the issue with a better perspective now.


But this is one important reason to fight for Equal Marriage. It forces Americans to adress that primal fear in our culture. And once those men and women address their fear of gays and perhaps more importantly, *gayness*-- suddenly the fear of all sorts of undetectable perils and hobgoblins burns away, like fog in strong sunlight.

[xchrom]

4. gays passing in society is a myth -- a fantasy.

since the advent of the christian era -- there have been violent persecutions of gay people -- some of them quite famous -- i.e. edward the II.

and thousands of nameless castrated, tarred and feathered, and in the case of lesbian forced marriage or accused of witchery and drowned.

w are told that w ''pass'' because we don't pass the stories of our persecution down to our children -- which is exactly the point i was trying to make.

we suffer in isolation each from the other.

until now. recent times.

as an out culture -- this hasn't been seen in over two thousand years.

we are new -- largely unconnected but glorious and wonderful all the same.

we have so much to proud of -- we are at the cutting edge of creating a new world for ourselves.

[Fovea]

5. I think we are defining terms differently.

When I say pass, it is shorthand for 'pass for straight.'

And while the Republicans had a closet door crisis, key closet gay conservatives
remain in power. The purge at the RNC did not hit K street, the real center of power in government these days.

The log closet republicans are like the king's jews in the middle ages.
They made a faustian bargain to sabotage their brothers and sisters. They hoped vainly that they could go directly from the closet to the protection of a powerful patronage. As is often the case with victim/victimizers, they did not clearly see how cynical was the regard of the neocons. They were too busy being anti gay.

[xchrom]

6. i understand 'pass for straight'.

i don't really make heads or tails of the rest of what you're saying.

gays at the center of conservative power simply take advantage of a curtain.

the days of the real closet in certain circles -- i.e. dc are over.
straight people simply looked the other way.

rather than physically castrate them.

but in historical terms -- we didn't ''pass''' -- we were isolated each from the other.
if you were physically assaulted for being gay -- you didn't pass that info on to your children -- you didn't teach your children openly what they needed to survive in an oppressive culture.

you either didn't have children -- or you just stayed silent about it if you did.

we were alone -- isolated each from the other.

and we still -- how ever open it seems today -- come into our gay enclaves by ourselves.

mostly -- our parents and friends aren't gay -- mostly our teachers aren't gay -- mostly we simply don't encounter and learn gayness from other people -- more importantly people like family.

[election_2004]

7. Fortunately....

We can serve as positive role models for slightly younger LGBTs, and "pass down" leadership through generations in that way.

It's definitely tougher than having built-in familial political support, but we still need to do it...

[Prophet 451]

3. Gay people are being too civilised about this

Fact is, we tend to think of a human right as something that has to be torn from the bloody fist of an oppressor, not argued over by lawyers. Gay people are trying to win their rights by court battles and public pressure and that's very noble, very civilised but far too polite. Forget the lawsuit, let's have some fucking riots! The Religious Reich wants to get antsy about having gay characters on TV? Let's have Ellen Degeneres reading the news, let's get RuPaul doing play-by-play on Monday night football, let's bring Quintin Crisp back from the fucking dead to teach the kids about literature. Let's make them sorry they ever mentioned the subject

[ruggerson]

8. Exactly

This is why I respect Gavin Newsom. He sat through Fuckface's State of the Union Speech and heard the bullshit about "defending marriage" and got pissed off and went back to his city and orchestrated a wondrous month of civil disobedience which garnered worldwide attention. And, in the process, secured his place in the history books.

I've often thought that the modern civil rights movement was successful because they knew how to play good cop/bad cop. They had the Black Panthers scaring the shit out of white America and then they had Martin Luther King, who seemed calm and mainstream by comparison, so he became a figure white America could turn to - his agenda became the agenda of the middle.

We have neither good cops nor bad cops and we need both.

[sui generis]

15. I'm right there with you. I'm ready to go spray paint pink triangles

on everything and break into stores and force people to give me manicures. I already have plasma teevee though plus it's kind of tacky to be tippling down the street in my prada with a component sturreo I just stole from the pawn shop. Reaaaauhlly. I'd have to drive to the other side of town to even FIND a pawn shop.

:rofl:

Okay, seriously though, if we were not making progress, then yes, marches, and "highly organized protest" activism.

But if for some weird reason FMA came up and passed, I'll be handing out torches and pitchforks and showing you how to use them on the bigots, and then grand-marshal that parade. We gonna take some scalps and some ball sacks, politically speaking, and when it's over we're going to be taking names and making lists and the worst of the offenders had damn well better never need another thing from a queer anywhere ever again. Ever. Because you've heard of the "no fly" list.

This is going to be the "no buy" list, with one important difference: everyone who's on it will certainly know how they got there. And more. We work in emergency rooms, finance, mortgage companies, banks, we employee people, we pull them out of fires, we serve in our military, we're their doctors, pharmacists, store owners, restaurant owners, delivery people, and sometimes, (shudder) employees.

Talk about being surrounded - it could get immensely ugly for the people on that list, and I'd be happy to circulate it at every opportunity to every newsie and nosey out there.

[LeftCoast]

9. We have many. Harry Hay is just one.

Harry Hay (April 7, 1912 – October 24, 2002) was a leader of the gay rights movement in the United States, known for founding the Mattachine Society in 1950 and the Radical Faeries in 1979. He was raised as a Catholic.

Starting in Los Angeles in 1950, Hay worked with a handful of supporters to found the Mattachine Society. At this time, nineteen years before the Stonewall riots, virtually no gays or lesbians were publicly out, it was illegal for homosexuals to gather in public, and the American Psychiatric Association defined homosexuality as a mental illness. Very slowly, he gathered members to this group. The Mattachine Society met in secret, with members often accompanied by a female friend to prevent being publicly identified as gay. Though Henry Gerber's gay rights group had briefly flowered in Chicago twenty years earlier, it was quickly shut down by authorities; Hay's successful launching of a lasting national gay network makes him a plausible entry for the founder of the American gay rights movement.

Although Harry Hay claimed 'never to have even heard' of the earlier gay liberation struggle in Germany - by the people around Adolf Brand, Magnus Hirschfeld and Leontine Sagan - he is known to have talked about it with European emigres in America including Mattachine co-founder Rudi Gernreich. (However, Gernreich arrived in America at age 14, and Hay had already written his gay manifesto when they met).

Read more about Harry Hay here...

[xchrom]

11. back in the day -- i had many friends in the radical fairies.

harry hay was remarkable -- and a great person in our history.

[Tyo]

10. We are all Martin Luther Kings

Every out gay or lesbian is a hero

[sniffa]

12. more of jarrett

[closeupready]

13. Actually, there are more than a handful.

In terms of, for example, Mr. Sulu, that baseball player who came out in the 80's, Greg Louganis - people who do that take great risks in personal and career terms. That's heroic, IMHO.

(Interestingly, maybe Coretta Scott King was like her husband, given that she fully supported gay rights despite the fact that many in the black community do not.)

[Catherine Vincent]

14. What about Representative Barney Frank?

I think he could be a hero of the gay rights movement.

[Deja Q]

16. I used to make a big noise about promoting civil unions

Even right down to my car, with enough bumper stickers to anger any tightie-rightie, and did I get some mean looks. :evilgrin:


But when your own counselor (a gay man) said I was being "militant", one has to laugh. Hmm, so 12 bumper stickers with stuff like "Hatred is not a family value", "Love makes a family", et al, is being militant? (there was nothing like "Jerry Falwell can suck my Tinky Winky" or any of the other juvenile stuff...)

When you park your car at a GLBT-themed store and two gay guys come out and point and laugh at your car, one has to wonder.

When your personal ad states you want to build a lifetime and have goals with somebody, all people do take time out of their browsing for bed buddies to call you "unevolved"... you begin to wonder what the heck defines a community worth fighting for.

Then you look at Pride events where men in skirts (and nothing else) are lifting them up for all to see what's underneath, and large floating phalluses, and one can only suggest "Maybe this is why the struggle for gay rights isn't being treated as seriously as it should be." And we all know the media loves looking for oddballs and foisting them out as being the norm. Sensationalism is what brings in the money, so that's where the media goes.

And if anybody thinks I'm being homophobic in this message, say so. No behind-the-scenes games this time. I don't think I'm being homophobic, not for posting what are valid observations based on real-life experiences and not a chapter of some fictional fantasy book. And peoples' actions do influence others. That's a universal paradigm. Even if we're oblivious to our actions at times. People point mine out, but I have a right to point out others' too.

On edit: Spelling, grammar