Beyond the Margins: Gay Rights Passes the Civil Rights Smell Test
The phrase “Gay is the New Black” has been around for a long time, but has recently gained greater popularity within and outside of the gay community as gay rights activists take to the streets to protest of anti-gay legislation or in support for marriage-equality measures; and coordinate state-wide campaigns across the country.
Photo by Kaitlin Whitman
In 2008, after the nomination of the nation’s Black president and the passage of Proposition 8, Prop 8, in California, The Advocate magazine published in its December issue the cover story Gay is The New Black: The Last Great Civil-Rights Struggle, which generated heated arguments on both sides of the proposition. The cover story put front-and-center the unsettled debate over whether or not it was ever appropriate to refer to something as “the New Black”, in particular something such as gay rights, an issue with which some prominent elements of the African American community have not had the best of relationships.
The debate ignited at a time when immediately after Prop 8 and initial reporting claimed that African Americans were the group responsible for Prop 8’s passage, had generated considerable amounts of animosity within the gay community towards African Americans. While the reporting was eventually proven to be an exaggeration of the facts, African Americans were not in fact the cause that passed Prop 8 (the breakdown was more accurately discerned to be based on religiosity and age), the damage was already done. African Americans and Black culture were labeled across the board as hypocritical for voting against equality even though they were once oppressed and homophobic. The response this environment provoked within the African American community, including many gay people of color, was one of frustration and anger towards the gay community, which many African Americans felt were trying to co-op their movement by setting their struggle and the significance of that struggle aside.
What followed was a myriad of arguments back and forth throughout the media and the blogosphere, with staunch gay-rights activists crying homophobia and African American screaming racism. And like what happens so often these days the merits of either case became lost in the hyperbole and rhetoric.
The situation has simmered down considerably since and cooler heads have prevailed and now both sides have the opportunity to examine the case being put forth on both sides.
A particular issue that was frustrating to some African Americans is the reference to the notion of gay-rights being “the new” Black, as it implied that the initial struggle is over and done with and society has largely moved on. Such rhetoric was particularly difficult for many civil-rights activists to accept who continue to struggle for equality and the end of institutionalized practices that have a detrimental effect on the African American community.
This chagrin is further supported by the fact as many have pointed out over the years past and to this day that even within the gay community there are substantial instances of racial bias and animosity. This causes many to question how any group could expect any sense of legitimacy in claiming the mantle of being the successor to the Civil-Rights Era if it does not follow and adopt the objectives sought out by civil rights activists.
Another point of contention for many African-American was the fact that to them the scope of what African Americans endured during the Civil Rights Era and under Jim Crow surpassed any formed of oppression, whether legal, emotional, or physical that gay Americans endured. To these African Americans nothing can ever be “the New Black” and no group has ever, and hopefully never will, have to endure what African Americans have.
This issue was of particular difficulty for gay-rights activist who sincerely believed they had a case. The issue before them was how could do make the case that gay-rights, in particular marriage equality, was a civil rights in much the same way as the fundamental right to vote without belittling the injustices African Americans faced and the Civil Rights movement they and others created that defined not just a generation but an entire country. What was settled upon was largely a matter of semantics: African Americans had a monopoly on “Civil Rights,” capital “c” capital “r”, but gay rights activists should be OK using the term “civil rights”, in lowercase, to describe their efforts.
African Americans’ monopoly on the term “civil rights” was never seriously challenged, likely because it was felt inappropriate; however, even within the African American community there were elements that felt African Americans were overstepping their bounds in making the case that only African American had rights to the term. One of the most prominent supporters within the African American community being Julian Bond, chairmen of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP, and long time civil-rights activists, who has been an outspoken supporter of full marriage equality rights, and spoke at the National Equality March last year.
There are others, such as one of Dr. Martin Luther King’s closest allies and confidants, Bayard Rustin, the unsung hero of the Civil-Rights Era, an openly gay person of color who helped organize many of Dr. King’s events. In 1986 Rustin gave a speech on behalf of gays in the state of New York where he declared, “The new niggers are gays.”
Today, blacks are no longer the litmus paper or the barometer of social change. Blacks are in every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from racial discrimination. The new “niggers” are gays. … It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change. … The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people.
Michael Eric Dyson, professor of Sociology at Georgetown University, also weighed in on the debate over whether or not gays can use the term, pointing out that the civil-rights movement of the 1960s’ borrowed elements of Gandhi movement to liberate India. Dyson’s underlying argument being that civil rights movements are rarely original in content, though they may differ in scope, and borrow heavily from similar campaigns from previous generations.
All of these men and many others rest their claim on the central belief that civil rights are not Black rights, women’s rights, or gay rights, but rather human rights; and thus applicable to all groups who struggle to further equality for all human beings.
The argument that gay rights are civil rights, and thus arguably a new version of Black at the very least, is further reinforced by the fact that the Supreme Court of the United States has recognized the right to marry as a fundamental right under the constitution ever since Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that made anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. Therefore to prohibit consenting adults from exercising their inalienable rights is as unconstitutional as prohibiting Americans from exercising their right to vote. This is the case being put forth now by Ted Olsen and David Boisess in federal court as they argue over the constitutionality of Prop 8 (see Perry v. Schwarzenegger).
It is true that gay and lesbian Americans have not endured a comparable scope of oppression as African Americans, who were lynched, beaten, and abused during the civil rights era as a result of them advocating for their rights; and it would be extraneous to engage in a back and forth discussion about ways in which gays have been oppressed in an attempt to legitimize the movements’ objective. After all neither the Civil Rights Act of 1964 nor the marriage equality victories that have been secured so far have been won because of oppression, but rather because a majority of Americans came to realize that it was ultimately the right thing to do.
Not all of the objectives set out in the civil rights era have been met yet, African Americans continue to live in a society where there are institutionalized forms of soft racism; and conversely even if marriage equality is established nationwide gay and lesbian activists and allies will still have more work to do. However, what we have learned over the years is that this is the very nature of civil-rights in our society: not a brief moment of time to be set aside after a couple pieces of legislative, but rather an exhaustive and grueling process that hopefully helps to inspire the next generation of civil rights activists.
As Dr. King famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but bends towards justice.”
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Are Women’s Rights Civil Rights? Women’s Suffrage? Gay marriage would not even be on the table if not for the Women’s Rights movement having redefined marriage as a civil contract between two autonomous consenting adults.
Equality for gays is more related to gender equality than to racial equality. Even conservatives know that as they often take aim at gay rights and women’s rights at the same time.
The problem is gay men don’t want to be compared to women. Because, they already are and they already find it degrading. But if society were different so that being a woman wasn’t degrading, if women were socially equal to men, well there wouldn’t be as much resistance to gay rights.
Great piece, and when I saw the headline for it I was about to go on a rant about looking at the rhetoric from different perspectives, but you did that well here.
From our struggle for gay marriage here in DC, I see now that there will be a segment of the population that just won’t make that bridge from the Civil Rights (or women’s rights) movement to gay rights. Our struggle is _similar_ but different in the eyes of some. But the gays can make some comparisons and borrow some ideas and tactics from other human rights actions and rhetoric.
I don’t find it degrading to be compared to a woman, but again I think these movements are different. But we can get some good ideas and mechanisms for change from other movements.
The American Revolution never ended.
In our beginning, only white land-owning men over the age of 21 (none of whom were openly gay) could vote, or hold office, or achieve economic and social success. Perhaps the strongest theme in our history is the struggle to free the oppressed and expand inclusion, essentially fulfilling the ideals and promise of the Revolution. The struggles to end slavery, end religious persecution, end the oppression of immigrants, grant women the right to vote, the progressive movement, and the various incarnations of the labor movement all have built upon each other to achieve a better more free America.
The Civil Rights movement continued that tradition and owes much of its success to the social change before it. It wasn’t created in a vacuum and it became more than just the liberation of African Americans. Look at all the rights groups that it simultaneously inspired, desegregation of minority groups, gender equality for women, Cesar Chavez’s farm workers, the Native American movement, the free speech movement, and the youth movement that successfully lowered the voting age to 18. And, yes, even the Stonewall Riots and the beginning of gay rights. They all inspired each other and built on each other’s successes.
With that in mind, I don’t agree with the statement “Gay is the New Black”, I say “Gay is the New American”. For it’s American to struggle, to shout one’s voice and be heard, and to fight for one’s own liberty. When we exercise this extraordinary national characteristic we not only stand on the shoulders of those who did it before us, but we form the foundation of those who will do it for generations to come. We’re all fighting for the same thing, a better more free America. The motivation of a protestor at a gay rights rally is the same as a marcher in Selma, as a Suffragette in a hunger strike, and as a New England farmer bravely defending Bunker Hill. That is why Gay is beyond the “New Black” but part of a larger story, it’s “the New American”.
Romeo, I completely agree with you, gay-rights has much more in common with gender equality, the two are inexplicably linked. And so much of homophobia is already based on the fear of the feminine.
I can see your point about gay men not being want to be compared to women and the women’s rights movement; however, I think another, more immediate cause for this disassociation is the fact that suffrage movement happened almost a century ago. Today we take the work the Suffragettes had to do and the oppression they endured for granted. We live in a world where it would inconceivable for there to have ever been a time when women did not have the right to vote.
The suffrage movement also happened in a time when there was limited media to perpetuate the images and sentiments into our brains. For the civil-rights movement of the 1960s we have the images of video of African-Americans being hosed down, attacked by dogs, and screamed at embedded into our brains so we naturally gravitate towards that one as a visual reference for the injustice.
Another comparison to the women’s right movement is the approach, which in many ways mirrors the approach maybe gay-rights advocates take–though women ultimately sought to amending of the constitution whereas gay-rights generally seeks the expansion through the equality protection clause.
Although I agree with a lot of what you said, I have to disagree with a couple points:
1. Gays ARE lynched, beaten, and abused on a regular basis. In some countries, we are jailed or executed. It is not safe to be gay in much of America.
2. Even if age and religiosity account for the black vote on Prop 8, that doesn’t change the fact that more blacks supported prop 8 than didn’t. Bigotry is inexcusable among any racial group, but it’s painful to see bigotry be perpetrated by the demographic that has been most harmed by it.
In the end, I am led to two key questions:
1) Is homophobia more prevalent among black voters than other racial groups?
I think the vote on Prop 8 proves that to be true, if the exit polls are trusted.
2) Does it matter? Is the homophobia of the black community worse or more consequential than the homophobia of, say, whites, or evangelicals?
That’s a much more difficult question.
On the one hand, a vote is a vote, and all “yes” votes counted the same, whether they came from a white or black voter. We should all be held to the same standard, and intolerance is inexcusable from anyone.
On the other hand, by virtue of their history, blacks hold a almost have a gatekeeper role on issues concerning discrimination. A black person arguing that gays don’t deserve civil rights may have a greater impact on an indifferent person. A black voice saying it’s okay to discriminate speaks louder than a white voice.
Prop 8 supporters did not shy away from exploiting this. They featured a rainbow coalition of actors in their ads to help persuade voters that they weren’t committing bigotry.
Raphel, you are absolutely right, gays and lesbians are brutally attacked regularly in this country and elsewhere. I did not intend to imply that life is all roses and ice-cream for us, but rather simply say that oppression happens on both sides and running a checklist to seemingly see who is oppressed the most does not really do much on the actual merits.
Ethnicity is by no means a waiver for any kind of bigotry, but that was not the point I was trying to make, rather it was pointing out the actual factors behind the reason why some African-Americans voted in high numbers for Prop 8. Simply looking at the ethnic make-up of the voters you are not really getting to the reasons why they voted one way or the other, which is really what’s important.
In simply saying Blacks are more homophobic you are not getting to the root causes or of anything that you can combat the homophobia, unless the proposition is that homophobia is somehow a genetic predisposition. And to add to this such a line of reasoning reinforces the conventional approach, which has been to put fewer resources into communities of color, which naturally perpetuates the cycle.
Instead if you breakdown the numbers, rather than just clumping them altogether as the “Black vote”, you begin to see trends that show you why some African-Americans are voting one way and ways to combat that. That’s why when researchers went back to look at the results they realized that the vote that it was not so much a “Black-thing” as much as it was a religious and age driven vote.
I’ve always maintained that just because one group was once oppressed does not mean that they in turn will become the greatest liberators. Clearly these are different issues, and while African-Americans position on the other side of the fence gives them a different perspective it doesn’t guarantee that they automatically will see the light. Freed men after the Civil-Rights did not all of a sudden rush to the defense to emancipate women after all.
There is no dispute over whether or not their is a homophobic problem within the Black community. That is a known fact. However, the driving forces however are not ethnicity, but rather external forces–the same forces that exist within the dominant group–that are amplified within communities of color for various reasons (I’ll to more of that in another column I hope).
I would just say that I believe it’s wrong that we should necessarily look and weigh the views of some African-Americans position on gay-rights more than others. Particularly because not every African-American you speak will necessarily have any conception of what it was like under Jim Crow. So just because they are Black doesn’t make them an expert on oppression. We shouldn’t assume that a once oppressed person has to be able and willing to connect the dots and see that all oppression is connected on some human rights level. It’s great when they do, i.e. Julian Bond, but again different issues. The Irish who were oppressed horribly under the British and lumped together with African-Americans when they arrived here in droves, did not become automatically the civil-rights activists. And possibly the most famous American examples are the Puritans, who escaped their own religious persecution only to do the same to others here.
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