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No
Marriage Between Black
Ministers
and Queer Community
By
Irene Monroe
A minute after midnight on Monday, May 17, was a
great getting-up morning for us lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender and queer residents in the state of Massachusetts
– at 12:01 a.m., same-sex marriages became legal. But it was
also a sad reminder for many African Americans in light of the
fact that 50 years ago the issue of racial segregation in
America's public schools was nationally shamed and ruled
unconstitutional in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Brown v.
Board of Education.
Although these two marginalized groups have much in common in
terms of their struggle for freedom, as well as in terms of
celebrating their individual civil rights victories, both
African-American and LGBTQ communities are not compadres in
the struggle for liberation.
“The gay community is pimping the civil rights movement and
the history. In the view of many, it's racist at worst, cynical
at best,” the Rev. Eugene Rivers, a local African-American
Boston minister and president of the all-male National Ten Point Leadership Foundation , told The Boston Globe .
While Rivers is known to take black nationalist and Afrocentric
points of view in dealing with all issues of race, the Rev.
Jesse Jackson, president of the Rainbow Coalition , is a more moderate voice. And while Jackson
adamantly feels that LGBTQ people deserve equal protection under
the law and that the Constitution should not be amended to ban
same-sex marriage, Jackson does, however, think the comparison
between gay rights and the black civil rights struggle is “a
stretch,” as he mentioned at a talk in March at Harvard Law
School. “Gays were never called three-fifths human in the
Constitution.” Jackson told his audience.
To get African-American male ministers, in particular, to think
outside of their narrowly constructed boxes about race is an
arduous task. And much of the reason is because of the
persistent nature of racism in the lives of black people and the
little gains accomplished supposedly on behalf of racial
equality.
Many African Americans see that civil rights gains have come
faster for queer people. From the Stonewall Riots of 1969 to May
17, 2004, the LGBTQ movement has made some tremendous gains into
mainstream society, a reality that has not been afforded to
African Americans.
And while the freedom to marry has been an arduous struggle and
a right long overdue for LBGTQ people, the debate did not begin
with queer people.
The marriage debate here in the U.S. began when African-American
slaves were forbidden to marry, so they “jumped over the
broom” – an African-American tradition – in front of their
slave masters to consecrate their nuptials until the end of the
Civil War in 1865.
A century later, the debate concerning interracial marriages
between African Americans and white Americans ended in 1967.
That year marked the moment when the U.S. Supreme Court declared
anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in the case of Loving
v. Virginia.
For many African Americans, the LGBTQ debate about the freedom
to marry appears to be more than just a pimping of the civil
rights movement to them. It also appears as the erasure of their
history as a people who are still striving to get what they feel
LGBTQ people already have – access to mainstream society.
While the feeling among African Americans is understandable, the
reason is, nonetheless, wrong. With such a myopic construction
of race, the oppressions of African-American LGBTQ people are
ignored not only at the expense of the AIDS epidemic ravaging
the entire African-American community, but is ignored also at
the expense of combating white supremacy.
One of the real issues behind black homophobia is African
Americans' lack of understanding about the pernicious
nature of white supremacy that not only impacts the lives of
black heterosexuals, but also the lives of black women and black
LGBTQ people.
African-American LGBTQ people suffer under the reign of white
supremacy, as do African-American heterosexuals. Racism is as
rampant in the white queer community as it is in the larger
society. And one of the reasons it continues to play havoc in
the lives of all African Americans is because subcultures within
the African-American community – like straights and queers –
work against each other rather than together to combat racism.
With the LGBTQ movement persistently donning a
white face, all other faces of color are marginal at best and
invisible at worst. And it is these faces that are also marginal
or invisible within their ethnic communities. However, these
faces of color become important, visible and needed to the
larger white LGBTQ movement only when the white LGBTQ movement
is actually pimping a black moment of the civil rights movement
for a photo-op to push their agenda.
In other words, many African-American ministers scoff about the
LGBTQ movement comparing its struggle to the black civil
rights movement for the following reasons:
* the LGBTQ movement exploits black suffering to legitimate
its own;
* it appropriates the content of the black civil rights
movement, but discards the context that brought about it;
and
* it is white queers' rallying cry against heterosexist
oppression, yet they dismiss the responsibility that comes with
their white skin privilege.
Also, because white LGBTQ people don't take responsibility for
their white privilege, it is their visible domination we
see in the movement. The Stonewall Riot of June 27-29, 1969
in Greenwich Village, New York City, started on the backs of
working-class African-American and Latino queers who patronized
that bar. Those brown and black LGBTQ people are not only
absent from the photos of that night, but they are also
bleached from its written history.
Because racial prejudice was a dominant
oppression all black people faced – straight or queer –
during the troubling black civil rights era of the 1960's, Dr.
Gerri Outlaw, an openly lesbian African-American professor of
social work at Governors State University, just outside of
Chicago, said, “Had those patrons been white the cops would
have harassed them, but there would not have been a riot.”
I posit that because
of the bleaching of the Stonewall Riots, the beginnings of LGBTQ
movement post-Stonewall is an appropriation of black and
brown queer liberation narrative absent of black and brown people.
And it is the visible absence of these black, brown and
yellow LGBTQ people that makes it harder for white queers to
confront their racism and for African-American ministers to
confront their homophobia.
At 12:01 a.m. on May 17, the city of Cambridge was the first to
issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Much deliberation
went on about who should be the first couple to get their
license. The photo-op would become one of the iconic images of
the event. The immediate thought was to look for same-sex
couples of color. But the few that reside in upscale Cambridge
were not available for a myriad of reasons. And the few same-sex
couples of color I talked to all told me they would feel
exploited. The next search was for biracial same-sex couples.
However, the couple Cambridge got was an elderly white lesbian
couple that we in Cambridge know and love dearly. However, the
selection process for the photo-op moment does not negate the
nagging problem of how race shows its face even in an important
historical moment like this one.
On the evening of May 16, Cambridge City Hall opened it doors to
celebrate all the work that went into gaining civil marriage
rights for LGBTQ people. African-American and out lesbian City
Councilor E. Denise Simmons dubbed the event, “Cambridge
Celebrates Marriage Equality.” Simmons was the first to
suggest that Cambridge jump-start same-sex marriages.
On May 16, as we waited for the clock to strike midnight, I was
reminded how many African-American Christian churches across the
country celebrate “Watch Night Services.” These can be
traced back to December 31, 1862, which was also known as
“Freedom Eve,” when African-American slaves came together
across the nation to await the good news that President
Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had finally become law. And
on that day, January 1, 1863, a new life began for us even as
the Civil War was still going on.
While the war on same-sex marriage will continue to be debated
in Massachusetts and across this country, in order for this
victory won by the LGBTQ community to be fully embraced,
understood and celebrated by the larger African-American
community, the LGBTQ community must also work with
African-Americans to combat their white supremacy.
The Rev. Irene
Monroe is a regular contributor to “A Globe of Witnesses.” Her monthly
online column is
Queer
Take . Irene may be
reached by email at
revimonroe@earthlink.net
.
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updated 2 November 2007
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