Bishop Harry Jackson, of Maryland’s Hope Christian Church, was on hand at NOM’s D.C. tour stop to discuss “out of control radicals” who, “in the name of civil rights” are “stealing others civil rights.” Sometimes I play a game where I remove the proper nouns from his speech, and I find it impossible to tell whether he’s bashing equality supporters or religious conservatives.
this guy
Bishop Harry Jackson Will Not Tolerate ‘Privileged Minority With a Whole Lotta Money’
Help make sure LGBTQ+ stories are being told...
We can't rely on mainstream media to tell our stories. That's why we don't lock Queerty articles behind a paywall. Will you support our mission with a contribution today?
Cancel anytime · Proudly LGBTQ+ owned and operated
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
Very few things get the blood boiling than a Black person spewing hatred against the Gays in the name of civil rights when it was not so very long ago that Gays marched side by side with the Blacks to end the laws in this country which relagated them to second class citizens denied the civil rights for which we are now fighting……….
greenluv1322
@PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS: How about resist your urge to talk about “blacks” as a group unless you are willing to be equally offensive to “white” people. In no way am I defending what this guy said but why the focus on his race. Every OTHER story on this site is about “white” homophobic people. Yet each and every time a “black” person is homophobic it’s all about race. Newsflash: each and every race is homophobic.
Furthermore, when is the last time YOU were out marching for the civil rights of “blacks” my guess is never! So you want to take credit for something some other gay might have done in the 1960’s. People get over it! He is just one black man!
david kaufman
I would love to see names and faces of those legendary gay folk supposedly marching in the 60s
furthermore, I would love to find out more about these “same civil rights” always spoken of
Last time I checked, these were very different movements with very different end goal.
Show me a Gay dude denied his right to vote in 2010 and then we can start talking amigo.
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
@greenluv1322: True the marches in the 1960’s were before my time. However I during college I frequented a number of bars where there were vintage Gays there and I loved hearing them talk about the days when they battled in NYC as the dawn of the Gay rights era dovetailed the Blacks civil rights struggle. Many of these older guys spoke of marching with fellow Blacks who in turn were with them at the dawn of the Gay rights. It was a mutual respect for the struggles both groups faced. That is what I am refering to in my post.
And if you read my first sentence I specifically stated a Black person refering to this particular man………….It seems that many Blacks conviently seem to forget the hate they faced for simply wanting to achieve equal rights that every other US citizen were entitled to…
Samwise
Off the top of my head, I can name one gay man who fought for black civil rights: Bayard Rustin. There were more who were less famous and almost always closeted, but don’t believe me; listen to Coretta Scott King: “Gays and lesbians stood up for civil rights in Montgomery, Selma, in Albany, Ga. and St. Augustine, Fla., and many other campaigns of the Civil Rights Movement. Many of these courageous men and women were fighting for my freedom at a time when they could find few voices for their own, and I salute their contributions.” – Chicago Tribune, April 1, 1998
And no, gays and lesbians are not discriminated against in exactly the same way as black people (except for the gays and lesbians who are themselves black): you can tell a black person is black just by looking at him/her. You can also tell that a black couple will produce black children. Whereas gay people are largely invisible, and are born into all kinds of different families. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t been discriminated against at all. And there certainly are parallels between the two movements. Mildred Loving (of Loving v. Virginia) actually came out and said that the fight for interracial marriage was comparable to the fight for same-sex marriage.
david kaufman
@samwise
yawn! work a bit harder my friend
Jeffree
Oh boy. I’m feeling like the announcement on a moving sidewalk that repeatedly intones “keep walking.”
The issue here isn’t race: it’s religion. The degree of animosity people have toward same-sex marriage is better correlated to their degree of religious affiliation than their race. To state this another way, people who attend church regularly are more likely to be against SSM than people who don’t — regardless of their ethnicity.
Usual caveats: yes, I know some denominations are “LGBT friendly” but they are vastly in the minority. Yes there is some correlation between ethnicity and religion, but the data have been very clear: religiosity statistically trumps race no matter how you slice the data.
Samwise
@david kaufman: I appreciate your thoughtful, well-researched post responding to my points.
Oh wait, you didn’t respond to any of my points. You just said “yawn” and told me to try harder. I’m sorry, is this political debate that you started boring you? Would you like me to set my part of the debate to music, so it’ll entertain you more?
Troll.
John S
Mr. Kaufman,
How about you quite being a douchebag and either get in line with gay rights or head over to the next NOM meeting. Lest you forget, both blacks and gays have been targeted for death simply for existing and the SPLC has proven time and again that anti-gay hate groups are just as vile and disgusting as any neo-nazi or KKK group in existence. Think before you speak and you might not seem like a bigoted asshole next time. As for the “same rights” BS, I don’t know, the right to keep a job or serve in the army equally, or the right to marry someone of their choice, those sound a hell of a lot like the same rights that Blacks were fighting for 60 years ago. Thanks and try again.
David Kaufman
@samwise
spare us the sound-track, but do come up with some original thinking and content.
Bayard Rustin; Mrs. King. It’s like you simply made a google search and typed in the first things that you found.
John S
@David Kaufman
where is you original thinking? I’ve yet to see you quote anyone, all you’ve done is insinuate that our rights aren’t as valid as black civil rights and when we mention MLK’s closest advisor and his wife who both were also members of the Civil Rights Movement, you dismiss them as being “unoriginal.” That’s quite pathetic seeing as how you’ve provided nothing of note to this conversation at all.
DR
@david kaufman:
While I think you raise a point we as a community must be aware of, that does not necessitate the need to be dismissive of the GLBT movement as a “civil rights” movement.
You are 100% correct when you allude to the fact that we have never experienced the same level of discrimination faced by racial minorities. We can vote, we are not counted as property or less of a person under the law, we have never been forcibly removed form our homes and placed in internment camps, we are not required to sit at separate lunch counters or drink from separate water fountains, etc. That’s why I’ve never been a fan of the whole “gay is the new black” movement espoused by some, because we do not face the same level of discrimination and never have.
However, let’s not feign ignorance to make a point, ok?
John S
I don’t see why it should be a contest of severity. In this country, at this time, no discrimination should be tolerated. Just because we were never chattel does not mean we haven’t been persecuted. And when you factor in the fact that we are group of citizens with an indelible trait expected to pay taxes and maintain civilized lives without a laundry-list of rights that are bestowed upon the masses and which have been denied to us by the greater populace, the correlations between the black Civil Rights Movement and the gay Civil Rights Movement become apparent and anyone who doesn’t see it is blind.
Mr. Enemabag Jones
@david kaufman:
Show me a Gay dude denied his right to vote in 2010 and then we can start talking amigo.
Show me a black dude who has been denied the right to marry a white woman in 2010–or denied the right to marry anyone.
If anyone is curious, this David Kaufman, is this David Kaufman:
http://www.queerty.com/same-sex-marriage-advocates-cannot-equate-their-struggle-with-the-african-american-battle-for-civil-rights-or-south-african-movement-to-end-apartheid-they-simply-have-not-earned-it-20100125/
He’s darkened Queerty’s doorstep in the past.
david kaufman
That’s me!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kaufman/co-opted-marriage-equalit_b_393988.html
Remember, you need to respect and understand a movement before you can mooch from it!
Mr. Enemabag Jones
@DR:
That’s why I’ve never been a fan of the whole “gay is the new black” movement espoused by some, because we do not face the same level of discrimination and never have.
The Constitution of the United States of America was amended to give black American freedom, and equality. Politicians want to amend the Constitution of the United States of America to ban our equality.
Mr. Enemabag Jones
@david kaufman:
Remember, you need to respect and understand a movement before you can mooch from it!
And you need to repay the debt you owe us, by supporting our struggle.
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
@John S: 100% Co-Sign….Any member of a group that has experienced hatred for simply living as they were born should feel empathy with another. That is why when a Black person or an Orthodox Jew or any other minority spews bile towards our community it makes me ill. Thousands of Gays have been denied and tossed out of housing and employment, Thousands have been beaten, and tortured many resulting in death. To state there is a degree of hurt or a threshold to cross that one must suffer to make it wrong is moronic…………
Mr. Enemabag Jones
@david kaufman:
BTW–Show some respect to your hosts here at Queerty and don’t pimp Huffington Post while you’re here. It’s one thing to promote a personal blog. But promoting an organization like HuffPo is rude and discourteous.
John S
@david kaufman:
You stated “Remember, you need to respect and understand a movement before you can mooch from it!”
How much did you get paid for the article at the Huffington Post? Based on your last comment & the fact that it is apparent from your writing that you have absolutely no understanding of the gay rights movement, kindly return any funds you have received for this article or any other articles you have written regarding gay rights. You call it “chutzpah” to even dare to compare the gay rights movement to the black civil rights movement. We’ve had to march for our freedoms, we have politicians making votes on our backs. Yet again, despite the fact that you don’t want to believe it, there are far more correlations in our movements than not. You mentioned in your article that one aspect of the civil rights movement was to stop lynching. How many gay men do you think have been killed simply because of who they are? I’m certain the number is nowhere near as high as black men but the fact that even 1 person dies simply because hatred is allowed to flourish against any group is a travesty of the highest accord.
David Kaufman
@ John S.
The Huffington Post does not pay its contributors.
Samwise
@David Kaufman: Dude, this isn’t Pitchfork. You can’t write off my argument because my civil rights references aren’t indie enough. “Oh, the people I reference in MY arguments are way more obscure. You probably haven’t even heard of them. Bayard Rustin? Yeah, I liked him till he sold out. He sucks now.”
You said you’d like to see some of these gay names and faces who fought for civil rights. I named a very high-profile one off the top of my head. Then I quoted Coretta Scott King mentioning that she’d personally known a lot. You implied that no gay people had ever fought for black civil rights, so I provided a bit of evidence that some had. I’m not going to write a goddamn term paper for you. Do your own research before you wander around ranting about how no gay person has ever helped the black civil rights movement.
toyotabedzrock
Didn’t know there was fine print in the constitution, lol.
desdemona
how can this guy talk about one group of people imposing their views on another. That’s ALL he is doing!
Chitown Kev
Leave to David Kaufman to come here and admonish the bad, bad white gays…
To be sure, some (hell, a lot for that matter) white gays are quite misguided. But Kaufman NEVER has anything to say as regards the coon show that Harry Jackson is.
Chitown Kev
@David Kaufman:
You know, the almost utterly vile thing about you is that you NEVER say anything in rebuttal to the hordes of black homophobes that I have seen post in some of your huffington post columns.
Whereas the true black gay activists that I know in the blogosphere have no fear in condemning either black religious homophobia or racism from white gays.
Yes, even Jasmyne Cannick.
http://www.jasmynecannick.com/blog/?p=9115
And correct me if I’m wrong, but I do believe that Harry Jackson (the Williams and Harvard Business School graduate as well as being a graduate of an upper crusty prep school) has no business talking about privilege.
Jallon
Way to put us uppity gays in our place, bishop.
Now you’ve finally gotten what you’ve always wanted: you get to be the big one who steps on the necks of the little guys.
Vicente Fox
Just what is this dinge the “bishop” of anyway?
edgyguy1426
David Kaufman: Schooled by the Samwisemeister! Love it.
Queer Supremacist
@Chitown Kev: Are you sure David Kaufman isn’t just an alias for Michael “white gay men have enough rights already” Steele?
Queer Supremacist
@greenluv1322:
White people have never been sold into slavery against their will in this country.
No one ever fought a Civil War in this country over whether white people were property or people who had the exclusive right to “own” themselves.
White people have never been the targets of discriminatory laws and institutions.
White people have never been the targets of terrorist hate groups who had power over every aspect of life in huge swaths of the country.
The people responsible for all that were white. Therefore we don’t expect much from them.
The only place I can think of where whites are an oppressed minority is Zimbabwe.
On the other hand, despite the parallels between black oppression and gay oppression, their are differences. Black people were free to marry each other prior to Loving v. Virginia. Black people were allowed in the military albeit in segregated units. And only very light-skinned blacks could pass for white. And black oppression lasted 400 years, while gay oppression is ongoing and has gone on 5 times as long. And what did either of us do to deserve it?
We gays are represented in every race, every religion, and every nation on Earth. Hell, even in other species!
@Jeffree: It is about religion, but race comes into it when bigots hide behind their race to justify their bigotry. I think that’s the difference.
Phil
@Queer Supremacist: @Jeffree: I don’t think it’s ever been about religion. I think it’s always been about how people go “wow” and then “ick” at us, and then use religion to justify their discomfort, and sometimes hate, with and of us. I mean, some people hate us with a passion, but most are happy to say “hmmm, no, I don’t think you’re equal to me,” and then proceed to discriminate against us ever so CIVILLY.
MaybeTruth
Plays Well – Better come into modern times. Those days of gays-united-with-blacks in mutual struggle are long long over. If they ever were (some of those old gays you were talking to often like to fantasize that they were involved in civil rights struggles of the 50’s and 60’s).
MaybeTruth
Queer supremo – Privilege is also an earned thing. Blacks kill each other at four times the rate that they did before the civil rights movement. If U.S. gays got full and totally equality, do you think they’d treat each other the same way?
Sed
Saturday, March 18, 2006
CS Lewis on tryanny.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” CS Lewis
L.
@Sed: That is one good quote there. Thanks.
DR
@Mr. Enemabag Jones:
And?
I can vote.
I’m not a slave.
I’m not legally 3/5 of a person under the law.
I don’t have to pass tests designed for me to fail in order to vote.
I don’t have to sue to get a free education under the law.
I am not being forced to eat, drink, sleep or sit somewhere else under the law.
And the list goes on.
Yeah, we have 1400 rights we don’t get from the feds or the state, but many of them we can mimic with the right lawyer. Some we cannot. But our identity as a movement has to be our own because our issues are different, our community is different, and the legal climate is different.
To simply piggy-back onto a movement we have minimal ties to and try to claim it as our own as a bunch of white folks? Not cool.
Carlos
@DR: Piggy back a movement? You mean the EQUALITY movement? When did one group of people monpolize inequality. You’ve as well as that uneducated Kaufman poster, time and time again made it seem as though gay people have never suffered and since gays today have not suffered like blacks yesterday that our struggles should not even be worth mentioning. As a double minority myself (latino and gay) I find it alarming the black community is not only angered but dismissive toward granting us any rights because we dare say we are fighting a civil rights battle. Our comparison being drawn is that blacks fought a civil rights battle, and we ARE fighting a civil rights battle today in the name of gay rights. To deny that, or turn this in to a victimizing of black folks, or demand we not deem our struggles as civil rights is both calculating and hateful.
Robert J. Kline
I’m near sick of minority groups who’ve dealt with injustice playing martyr in a time when no one is as discriminated against as gays. gays- wake up! the people calling you to not compare our injustice to injustices from the past in history are the enemies who are trying to silence us. any true minority who has over come has no ill will toward other minorities fighting for their civil rights using them as a template for hope.
i can’t even believe we’re having an argument about how dare gays, who are being killed, bashed, fired, and THE most hated group today (and it’s totally PC to hate on us) dare compare our struggles to blacks. The fact that this is even an issue goes to show exactly how far blacks have made it in society today and how disinfranchized gays are. if gays got their rights first and blacks were comparing their movement to ours, you can bet not a single person would complain! that would be utterly un PC. But a gay person dare say “yes, for anyone who is not a blind mule, there is an obvious parellel between interracial marriage and same sex marriage” and it is met with shock, waves, and hate.
our president of our country is BLACK. while my gay partner of 32 years and I can’t even get a civil union in the state we live. I damn well will use any past chapter in history to further MY rightful rights and if you don’t like it, move out of my way as I sadly help enhance your rights with my efforts.
jason
Haven’t I told you that black culture is vile? It’s one of the most vile cultures out there. You only have to look at Jamaica, Malawi and the American black. They are exceptionally religiously fundamentalist. American blacks, especially those of slave ancestry, need to have a good look at themselves.
jason
Blacks never wanted civil rights for all. They simply wanted civil rights for themselves. They are one of the most selfish minority groups in existence.
IonMovie05
@DR:
“To simply piggy-back onto a movement we have minimal ties to and try to claim it as our own as a bunch of white folks? Not cool”
So many things wrong with that drivel; where to begin?
A.) Every group of people facing injustice by way of their civil rights has a prominent tie to every other group of people facing injustice by way of their civil rights; past, future and present. If you can’t grasp that….U.S History Class via community college courses are exceptionally affordable. Please consider an outlet.
B.) We’ve claimed the black civil rights era was actually not black people, but gay people and we own that entire movement? really? bold statement which I’m sure you have researched facts, quotes, stats, and bios to link for us on here. Can’t wait.
C.) “…as a bunch of white folks…” you’re right. Since a majority of gays in this world are white. And to so loosely use a vague word (‘bunch’) when making a blanket statement discredits your credibility but then again, you achieved that fairly early on. Memo to your brain cell(s), there are a ‘BUNCH OF’ black/brown/and everything in between colored folks who are gay who are fighting for marriage equality, many of which recognize the similarities between civil rights and lack of them.
I have a feeling your issues have less to do with how gays go about wanting marraige and more with gays wanting to marry in the first place, otherwise, I can’t imagine why you’d be so careless posting on such a careful cause of concern.
Read more: http://www.queerty.com/bishop-harry-jackson-will-not-tolerate-privileged-minority-with-a-whole-lotta-money-20100816/comment-page-1/#comment-336729#ixzz0ws16yOPj
DR
@Carlos:
It’s not our movement to co-opt, Carlos. We have completely different issues to deal with. We do not face, nor have we ever faced, the same level of discrimination faced by African-Americans until the USSCt got involved, we never faced what the Japanese-Americans faced during WWII, etc. To even imply that the mere fact we’re fighting for equality makes our movements the same is not only insulting to the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s, it’s a smack in the face to Stonewall, ACTUP, Queer Nation, Daughters of Bilitis, the Mattachine Society and the rich history GLBT folks have in terms of addressing our own struggles for acceptance and equality.
Methinks one of the biggest problems with this fight is that some of you are so busy co-opting everyone else’s fight, you ignore your own history.
I read Mr. Kauffman’s HufPo piece, and agree 100%. We’re arguing over marriage versus civil unions or the right to serve in the military. The Civil Rights movement of the 60s was demanding basic civil rights, the right to be treated like a human being. The right to stay in a hotel or eat in a restaurant, to vote, to get a basic education. While our issues are important to us, we have to recognize that we are not starting in the same place 1950s or 1960s African-Americans started, we are not coming from a place of complete and utter subjugation which required a Civil War and a Constitutional Amendment to fix, just for starters.
Draw on our own history. Gay is not the new black. Gay is its own movement, and we need to remember our own history, and our own leaders besides Harvey Milk.
jason
No one group has a mortgage on civil rights. Civil rights means equal rights. Equal rights mean that you are free from discrimination on the basis of who you are. Sexual orientation is part of the “who we are”.
Samwise
Look, no one’s going to win a battle of “who’s more discriminated against.” Nor can you make direct comparisons between blacks and gays. As I said earlier, gays CAN’T be discriminated against in the exact same way as blacks because we’re a fundamentally different kind of group. You can’t stop us from voting because you have no way of telling who the hell we are. A poll worker can recognize a black face, and intimidate that person from voting. Homosexuality isn’t immediately visible; no poll worker can tell every gay person who walks in to vote. At best, they can tell only the most flaming ones.
Also, gay parents don’t produce gay children, so you couldn’t enslave all gay people like they did blacks. Once the first batch of gay slaves die (and God only knows how they managed to round them all up in the first place), the next will be born to every race, class, and religious group. Every new generation of gays is scattered all over the place, making long-term institutionalized discrimination very difficult.
Does this mean we’ve had it easier? God no. Ethnic groups have the advantage of raising their children to be proud of who they are, of knowing who their community is and building it up and keeping it running for their children. We were never enslaved. We WERE rounded up into concentration camps (See: triangle, pink). We WERE, for generations, deprived of any knowledge of who we were or that we weren’t alone.
We don’t have any vivid images of slaves on a plantation, or people packed together in a slave ship. There weren’t any images because we were invisible. Our struggle is century upon century upon century of gay people hating themselves, killing themselves, marrying to try to change themselves, living in silent shameful suffering – thousands of them, each thinking that he or she was the only one in the world. Thousands of them isolated, invisible, silent, miserable. And the few brave or stupid enough to break that silence (or those who got caught) were arrested, put to death either by the state or by their neighbors.
With the rise of industrialism and the rise of big cities, we finally started to meet each other and discover we weren’t alone. And that’s when they really cracked down, with laws against more than two gay men meeting at a time. Laws against bartenders serving gay people. Laws against men dancing together. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
We have not been oppressed in the exact same way as blacks. We have not been oppressed in the exact same way as women. We have not been oppressed in the exact same way as the poor. But guess what? The black civil rights movement built on the labor movement. The feminist movement built on the black civil rights movement. The gay rights movement build on the feminist movement. And somehow, everybody managed to do this without being exactly the same or having exactly the same history of discrimination. Imagine that.
Carlos
@DR:
You’re asserting that in order to use the term “civil rights” there needs to be a suffarage scale, and unless your groups suffering trumps the previous groups, don’t insult them by using the term ‘civil rights’. Yes, our group is fighting for the ability to not get fired for being gay in states like Tennessee. Not have elected officials in states like North Carolina say they train deputies and sherriffs to target gays. Not be denied seeing the same tax benefits as hetrosexuals under the eyes of government. Not be bashed for walking down the street. Not be kicked out of our own families homes for finding the same sex appealing.
Your message is that gays don’t suffer nearly as much as others who’ve suffered in histories past and my message to you is: how much more homophobic, hateful and ignorant can you get?
I wish you could talk to my former roommate and late best friend who led one of the most brutal lives I’ve known and all for being gay. Homeless by the will of his own parents at 15. Gay bashed on his own 16th birthday on the streets. Had a church that fed the homeless deny him sleeping on their premise (even though they had no issue with other homeless doing the same) because he appeared outwardly gay. Came in to my life, change my outlook on life, cleaned up his own life, got a job, was fired from the job when the new general manager fired all three employees within months (legal in our state) and then he abruptly took his own life.
When I hear people like yourself attempt to paint this vibrant picture of how good gays have it compared to others before them, and have the guts to suggest we should some how be appreciative for all these “blessings” and sit down and shut up makes me livid beyond words. YOUR life may have been peaches & cream with a side of normalcy but to say gays don’t deal with this that and the third as a matter of fact tells me you are NOT qualified to speak on this topic. simply put, your agenda to denounce gay rights and gay struggles trumps your ability to be objective toward gay rights and gay struggles.
J.C
“But guess what? The black civil rights movement built on the labor movement. The feminist movement built on the black civil rights movement. The gay rights movement build on the feminist movement. And somehow, everybody managed to do this without being exactly the same or having exactly the same history of discrimination. Imagine that.”
AMEN! As a poster so perfectly pointed out above, just the fact that there’s an uproar over gay people siting black civil rights movement as an *example* of hate hope shows the societal homophobia that exists. Many groups have used previous groups not only as the golden standard to learn from but to educate masses. The backlash over gays using blacks as theirs has very little to do with whats on the surface and more to do with some feeling gays are so beneath black people that they shouldn’t even be in the same sentence as them. It’s stemmed purely from homophobia.
Chitown Kev
@J.C:
“The black civil rights movement built on the labor movement.
”
I think the movement for Indian independence had a lot to do with the black civil rights movement as well; black newspapers covered Gandhi and events in India very thourghly.
@DR- You’re correct, I believe that we should draw more from our own history, making analogies where appropriate.
But not a whole lot of gays even know about gay history much less black history.
The real shame of it is I do believe that internalized homophobia has a lot to do with why gays want to latch on to black history; it’s gays (of all ethnicities) that get the general feeling that their own history of oppression and survival is not good enough to stand on its’ own.
And that’s really sad.
DR
@Carlos:
Your comments, and the comments of a few others posting in this thread, show me that you don’t have an idea as to why various members of the African-American community get so annoyed at the idea that the GLBT community takes the position that blacks, latinos, and various other racial and ethnic minorities get so divided over this idea that we should all get along and support each other as IronMovie seems to think.
I’m not going to apologize for accepting the fact that position. Yeah, society sucks for some GLBT and not others. But I’m fed up with this psuedo-intellectual notion that somehow all oppressed minorities are supposed to share an identity and forget their own history. There are dramatic differences between the struggles. It’s not a matter of who has it worse or better, it’s a plain and simple historical truth which some in our community like to twist into a game of “who had it worse” whenever history is actually mentioned.
Do any of you people know who Del Martin and Phylis Lyon are? How about Barbara Gittings? Harry Hay? Jeanne and Morty Manford? It’s high time for the GLBT community to learn about its own history.
Chitown Kev
@Carlos:
I’m not talking about the use of the term “civil rights”, I believe that gays have just as much right to use it as anyone else.
But our oppression isn’t exactly like what blacks have gone through (though there are similarities) or what women have gone through (thought there are similarities) or what labor went through.
Let’s talk about our own oppression and what we have gone through and continue to go through; it’s honorable enough to stand on its’ own.
Chitown Kev
@jason:
Jeez, you’d never think that MLK didn’t want to wage a war on poverty and considered a March of impoverished people on Washington.
You’d never think that MLK reached out to poor whites in the South either. (and some of those poor whites actually did not having voting rights).
Chitown Kev
@Samwise:
You can name one; I actually KNOW several (including one white gay). And I know of quite a few white gays that did fight in in the civil rights movement.
But you can’t even tell me why gays could never have gotten away with fighting alongside blacks as an organized group (and a lot of blacks who ask “where were the gays, then” miss this point as well).
If you knew your history, you’d know why. I am in complete agreement with DR on that score.
John (CA)
The civil rights movement was not a “selfish” power grab. And to equate black liberation with white supremacy is a twisted distortion of history.
From the very beginning, the concept of black liberation has been one of common struggle rather than exclusion. Frederick Douglass spoke out against the appropriation of Native American land. W.E.B. du Bois – the founder of the NAACP – had plenty to say about colonialism in the Middle East, Asia, and South America. Martin Luther King was a staunch opponent of American intervention in Southeast Asia. Nelson Mandela has stated that he was inspired by events in 1940s India. It is not commonly known that many U.S. states had laws banning Asians from marrying whites. Loving didn’t just erase that injustice for black people. Nor is it generally acknowledged that the passage of the Civil Rights Act(s) meant that Congress had to do comprehensive immigration reform for the first time in history. Previously discriminatory immigration laws – which tended to favor whites over everyone else – were swept away in the process.
Based on this long history of inclusion, gays and lesbians should be welcomed into the civil rights tent with open arms. However, we need to frame the debate in such a way where the “common struggle” angle is obvious. Because it simply isn’t to many minorities. The face of gay rights in the media is usually white, wealthy, and conservative. And it is quite difficult to draw attention to their struggles with institutional discrimination when, outwardly at least, they seem to have no trouble getting their way.
Samwise
@Chitown Kev: How could you accuse me or anyone else here of not knowing our history, just because we’re drawing parallels with the black civil rights movement? You don’t know any of us. You don’t know what we know. All you know is what we’ve said in this thread, which has been EXCLUSIVELY about whether or not the gay rights movement has anything in common with the black civil rights movement. I like how you just go ahead and assume that I don’t know anything about the Mattachine Society, or ONE Magazine, or Stonewall, or the Daughters of Bilitis, or the Gay Liberation Front – just because I didn’t mention them all specifically in this thread. You want us to talk about our history? Comment on a blog post about our history. Do you go into Davey Wavey threads ranting about how we must be ignorant of our history because none of us have mentioned it in that particular place?
We’re on the same side: we both understand that the gay rights movement is a struggle for civil rights. We both understand that homophobic discrimination is not identical to racial discrimination. The thing is, though, the black civil rights movement established a lot of ideas in our culture – like the idea that rights and opportunities shouldn’t be withheld from a person because of something about him that he can’t change. Like it or not, talk about it or not, we are building on those ideas. And the people who argue that black civil rights are nothing like gay civil rights are almost ALWAYS doing so from a position of homophobia. The argument is always, “You’re not like them because they’re brave and you’re disgusting and wrong.”
“You can name one; I actually KNOW several (including one white gay). And I know of quite a few white gays that did fight in in the civil rights movement.”
Uh… good for you? What do you want, a trophy? I’m a 24-year-old living in Colorado. I was born too late and in the wrong area of the country to know any of these people personally. Is this supposed to be some kind of statement on my moral or intellectual failings? Does not knowing those people personally somehow mean that I’ve never picked up a history book?
“But you can’t even tell me why gays could never have gotten away with fighting alongside blacks as an organized group.”
What do you mean I can’t even tell you why? You never even asked. It’s because the vast majority of us were in the closet. We couldn’t wander around screaming, “I’M GAY AND I SUPPORT CIVIL RIGHTS!” because we’d get killed and just make the civil rights movement look bad. Freaking duh. Please don’t accuse me of ignorance because I didn’t answer questions you never asked.
B
It’s kind of ironic that Harry Jackson’s whine could (for the most part) just as well been made by a Grand Wizard of the KKK.
He seems particularly miffed regarding the 14th Amendment (although he does not mention it by name), which gives equal rights to all Americans unconditionally. Yet without it, he could have been denied a meaningful education (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution : “[The] Equal Protection Clause requires each state to provide equal protection under the law to all people within its jurisdiction. This clause later became the basis for Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court decision which precipitated the dismantling of racial segregation in the United States.”)
I guess he wants the Constitution of the U.S. modified so that the 14th Amendment would exclude LGBT people, just as the KKK would have liked it modified to exclude racial minorities. As they say, “birds of a feather flock together.”
Jeffree
Can we get back to basics? Any time you compare you need to contrast.
“To compare”: = to describe how two or more things or situations are alike/ similar.
“To contrast”: = to describe how two or more things or situations are different.
There are similarities between the struggles of African-Americans to obtain civil rights, but there are also major differences. To focus on one side of that equation and ignore the other doesn’t help any of us.
African-Americans and Latinos, etc. still face discrimination. The laws that exist to protect them are not uniformly applied.
LGBs face some similar issues and our rights in terms of marriage, employment, adoption, etc. vary from state to state. With DADT in place, our LGB sisters/ brothers face a constant threat. ENDA won’t be passed anytime soon.
There shouldn’t need to be a competition for “who had/has it worse”. That’s not the point.
Until more LGB people outreach str8 people of color more effectively, we shouldn’t expect their automatic support.
Reaching out does work.
Until someone else understands that you understand their struggles, they’re unlikely to embrace yours. That involves a lot of listening and conversations. Ask about what *they* face on a daily basis, and be able to tell them what you understand before you even *think* about telling them what you deal with.
Empathy is everything.
That works, but it’s a long slow process. There’s no quick fix here.
Chitown Kev
@Samwise:
“It’s because the vast majority of us were in the closet.”
That’s only part of it.
There were some out (and white) gays that did take marching for black civil rights into consideration.
In that context, any gay who marched for civil rights HAD to be in the closet…part of it was making the civil rights movement look bad but there was something else quite pragmatic behind that.
And yes, we are on the same side.
“The thing is, though, the black civil rights movement established a lot of ideas in our culture – like the idea that rights and opportunities shouldn’t be withheld from a person because of something about him that he can’t change. Like it or not, talk about it or not, we are building on those ideas.”
Two thumbs up for this thought here, although I would replace “idea” with “ideal.”
And I think that Queerty should do a weekly blog post about our history, myself.
James L.
@Jeffree: That goes both ways. Why should gays be the only ones doing the listening, sympathizing, and understanding ethnic struggles? You say we must outreach them for the struggles they went through. You say we must support them on that. You make that pretty automatic, and make the need for our support of them very automatic, yet when it comes to attaining ethnic minority support you brush it off as not needing to be expected or automatic. That we gays should WORK for our equality but when it comes to ethnic minorities, we need to automatically hear their stories and side.
As another poster said, the few of you posting on here with that notion are homophobic, and worse, you feel ethnic injustice is far worse than homophobic injustice. Don’t expect gay people on a gay blog to agree with you on that in a time when being gay has FAR more struggles than being any ethnic minority.
IonMusic
@Jeffree:
Sounds to me like you’re making grand excuses for homophobia from minorities. Should we only be forgiving of homophobia when it comes to black/brown people and condemn white homophobia?
Your rationale of sitting, waiting and throwing dinner parties all while begging would have us seeing tangible gay rights within a 100 years. Good luck with that. I’d rather go protest outside the offices of Senator Diaz in New York as opposed to kicking rocks and telling my LGBT friends “he’s a homophobe because he’s a minority, and it is what it is for now. Just be patient, and invite him over for dinner, all while he tries to strip you of all your rights.”
Nice try Jeffree, but no one gets a pass for being a homophobe in 2010. Not even minorities (gasp!)
RLS
I guess what I don’t understand is why gays are so quick to try to co-opt the black civil rights movement while simultaneously ignoring black gays and the race problem we have in our own community.
It seems disingenuous and intellectually dishonest.
I also think that we continue to give people the wrong idea about gays as this “privileged” minority when in reality we earn less than our straight counterparts. We’ve bought into an idea of gay wealth that is really hurting us politically.