SOUNDBITES — “I do not believe the battle for LGBT rights will ever be won until we can diminish the homophobia in black communities and until more in the black LGBT community join the battle openly. (It is awfully easy for a straight man to say “come out” – I can only imagine the scorn and derision that would follow some who did so.) I’ve often wondered what would be the result of black LGBT church goers standing up in the churches they attend and saying ‘I’m gay – you know me – I’m like you. I am what God made me. Why do you treat me so badly?’ (It is equally easy for a non-church goer like me to say that.) If not a church goer, I am an optimist – and I believe the day when equality for all reigns will soon come.” —NAACP chairman and civil rights awesomeness Julian Bond, on engaging gay blacks for the new equality fight [PHB]
julian bond
‘I do not believe the battle for LGBT rights will ever be won until we can diminish the homophobia in black communities and until more in the black LGBT community join the battle openly’
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Brian
Julian Bond gets it – Religion made us wrong and we need to reverse that “branding” and re-define ourselves. It make take time to get Black Churches (Baptist) a while, but they need to reject the Biblical lies about homosexuality. Similar to the way biblical lies about racism and slavery have been neutered.
One of my friends, a Black man in his 30s, hates homosexuals and thinks they’re defective. He’s not religious. His mother was. He has concluded he got his views from his Mother and she got them from “religion.”
I agree with Julian’s suggestion:
“I’ve often wondered what would be the result of black LGBT church goers standing up in the churches they attend and saying ‘I’m gay – you know me – I’m like you. I am what God made me. Why do you treat me so badly?”
But what Church? What denomination? What religious organization is prepared to say Homosexuality in Not Wrong, Sinful or Deviant? “Welcome” or “accepted” is not enough – there is nothing WRONG with us.
As long as we are “wrong,” we will never have equality.
Cam
Well I live in DC, and a majority black city council is pushing through a Marriage rights bill, when one insane pastor from MD. tried to fight the bill and hold rallies against it less than 100 people showed up in this majority black city, and a group of black pastros sent out letters in support of marriage.
I’m not saying that there isn’t more work to do, the typical thing that homeless people yell at you here if you don’t give them money is “Damn Faggot”.
However, in this majority black city, the govt. and community seems overall very supportive. I’m out at work and many of my co-workers are black and are completely accepting, the same kind of acceptance I see throughout the entire city. Just my two cents.
afrolito
I can totally see why queerty posted this “soundbite”…it’s a race baiting/blame blacks gift from heaven delivered by a black man.
Julian Bond is an icon, and has done a lot of great things in the struggle for black equality, but he seems to be laying the blame for gay civil rights at the feet of blacks, and that’s just bullshit. Yeah Julian…”it’s awfully easy for a straight man” to tell gay black men to fight for a gay agenda that often excludes them based on pervasive racism in the so called “gay community”.
He’s right about fighting homophobia i black churches, but it’s equally pervasive in ALL CHURCHES. If every black church started preaching the beauty and humanity of gays next sunday, there would still be homophobia and discrimination against gays on monday.
Shelby
@afrolito: I have to agree with you. This site’s negative obsession with the black community amazes me. One week can’t go by without a negative story regarding the black community. If it appears this way to me- a caucasian woman, how does it appear to a black person?
Cam
I know that there is some people that say that celebs coming out really don’t do much, but I really, in this instance would love to see Queen Latifa finally come out. Would it end homophobia? Of course now, but I really think it would spark some discussions. And again, DC is a majority black city, and the city council is gay friendly, several black churces have written statements supporting gay marriage etc… While faggot is still the favorite insult used by any homeless people that want to lash out, over all this majority black city is one of the most gay friendly cities in the country. A HELL of a lot more gay friendly than any city in Utah, Idaho, Montana, etc…
Lloyd Baltazar
I like this quote. This is very true. We DO need more Black faces to defend Gay & Lesbian rights for equal rights and marriage equality. Until the Black community can show us that overwhelming amount of PUBLIC and MEDIA support—-the fight for Gay civil rights will continue to be very difficult.
Renee
Of course queerty jumped all over this. When this site is not busy appropriating from the Black community, it is busy preaching to us about the ways in which we are uniquely homophobic. Well I would like to know when you are going to start to feature intersectionality in your work? How about even the occasional mention of the differently abled or the poor. Here is another huge leap, how about dealing with the fact that POC means more than Black, it means every single non White citizen. The focusing on the Black community is indeed racist because Whiteness loves to present us as the oppressor. I will have you know that we are still a minority group and so if tomorrow every single Black person were to become GLBT tolerant there would still be rampant homophobia in society.
rudy
I don’t see how this article is at all negative – ditto the article and clip of that remarkable Mr. Manago.
Sadly, everything is being taken through the distorting lens of California, Prop 8, and the less than adult but understandable white gay reaction that followed.
Black homophobia is not “unique” because it’s any worse than white – it’s because it’s roots and solutions are different – and its main victims are black both straight and gay alike.
That is the reason Bond, Manago, Sharpton and Jackson are addressing this (and they should be applauded for it)not because it’s spoiled some white celebrity’s wedding.
Chitown Kev
@rudy:
“Black homophobia is not “unique” because it’s any worse than white – it’s because it’s roots and solutions are different – and its main victims are black both straight and gay alike.”
Exactly. I also agree that the whole Prop8/California part of it is really distorting.
See, I’ll be damned if some of the white people that post some of the most racist garbage in the comment sections of posts like these tells me about “black homophobia” based on little more than hip hop and a CNN exit poll without any real knowledge of the black community.
Cheesus
ill tell you, i was in griffins park in LA at that observatory a few months ago (im from nyc) and i saw a huge groop of christos holding hands, bowed heads…all blonds, well there was one asian (of course), but anyway..they scared me so much…i got all nervous…basically what im saying is that before we condemn a community without evidence the fight remains againgst those we know to be sworn enemies….the christian elite virtuosity.
me
Great quote by a great man, not surprised that the usual suspects want to hide the truth he speaks and put the blame on “racist gays”. So so so typical…
Chitown Kev
@me:
Hide the truth about what? I wish we had a section where you could reference all of my comments but anyone that knows me on these threads knows that I harbor some very, very negative sentiments toward the straight churchified parts of the black community and their church queen enablers to the extent that I truly don’t feel a part of those portions of the black community.
I’ll repeat what Rudy said, I just don’t think that white folks know enough about “black homophobia” to even talk about it. A CNN exit poll can’t tell you shit as compared to the 42 years that I’ve been on this Earth, the 25 years I’ve been out (right in the beginning of the AIDS crisis) and having grown up as a product of black churches (and don’t get my Mom started on the churches, she’s hates the church even more than I do…see, black folks ain’t monolithic).
Hell no, you can’t tell me shit about it.
lloyd Baltazar
Unfortunately, many commenters try to equate the Black community acknowledging their own homophobia as an absolute solution to Gays and Lesbians being discriminated in society. NO ONE IS SAYING THAT.
Granted, homophobia will not end if Blacks more openly support the Gay & Lesbian community. But it helps the cause and decreases the fear against Gays and Lesbians in this country. If you cannot see that, I truly feel sorry for you.
Just because Queerty targets Black people, their homophobia, their bigoted Black Christian churches that continue to discriminate against Gays & Lesbians DOES NOT mean they are overlooking other races or churches that also oppose Gays & Lesbians.
The Black community needs to look into their own mirror and acknowledge the same discrimination that they have faced for centuries——They need to exercise both compassion and sympathy to the many Gays & Lesbians who are persecuted, shamed and discriminated everyday by becoming more openly supportive of the LGBT community rather than overwhelmingly supporting Prop 8 which passed in California.
YES, I am STILL pissed that an overwhelmingly amount of Black people enabled Prop 8 to pass in my state. If you have a problem with that, you can go @#@#$%!@! yourself.
B
In the Comment number 1, Brain complained about “the Biblical lies about homosexuality.” Now, there are a lot of lies being told about homosexuality with Biblical justifications, but the lie are more what people say is in the Bible than what is actually in it.
Christian beliefs range from a belief that the Bible is divinely inspired (and has to sometimes be interpreted poetically) to the belief that their Deity used a celestial Dictaphone and that the Bible must be taken literally. Regardless, most of them will immediately discount anything you say if you call the Bible “lies.” So, Brian’s hyperbole is counterproductive – it will just piss off the people you need to convince (Christian voters). Those people are much more amenable to criticism of (a) the accuracy of translations and especially (b) human error in interpreting the text, You will have much better luck in changing the minds of Christians if you use the approach outlined in http://www.lionking.org/~kovu/bible/section05.html than in following Brian’s example.
To give just one example of where “Biblical lies” is an exaggeration, take Levicitus, which homophobes extensively quote out of context to justify their prejudices. Does it contain lies? Well, according to http://www.religion-online.or/showarticle.asp?title=2 “We know from archaeological evidence that Cyrus allowed a number of conquered peoples to rebuild their homelands and local temples. In each of these cases he required the newly re-established priesthood to publish its traditional law. Leviticus, in this scholarly view, is the result of the Judean priesthood’s effort to do so.” Levicitus may or may not be an accurate description of ancient Jewish customs or laws, but it does not contain lies – it is apparently a government-required report written for Cyrus stating what laws a reconstituted priesthood intended to, or at least wanted to, enforce. As to all the “death be upon them” stuff, while it could have been meant to impress Cyrus by showing Cyrus that they intended to run a tight ship, we now have a contemporary example of what happens when a formerly marginalized priesthood takes over a country. That example is called “The Taliban”.
jason
Black civil rights is a great cause but blacks have never really been willing to extend the civil rights notion to gays, some of who have a black skin color.
I think it points to the fact that the black civil rights movement was largely a movement based on machismo.
Chitown Kev
@jason:
Wow!
First of all, civil rights notions aren’t for the “extending” by any group of people. Although I think I know what you mean by that statement.
As for the machismo of the black civil rights movement… there’s something to that. But that would be true of a lot of movements (other than women’s suffrage and women’s rights, of course).
Some would say that the gay civil rights movement has a bit of machismo to it, actually.
M Shane
I’m not sure where the bizarre info came from that an overwhelming number of black people allowed proposition 8 to pass in Calif. Have you been to California? There aren’t that many black people.
In any case Gay rights don’t have anything to do with marriage. As long as it remains a religious insitution imbeded in government and gays keep asking keep asking the government to change religious sacrements instead of asking for a seclar option they are screwed.
Furthermore , I suspect that, black drunks and crack heads on the streets are using the “fagot ‘as a handy derogation like we would (at obne time call people we didn’t like ‘niggers’.
get serious.
Andrew
@B: The PROBLEM is +70% of our fellow citizens BELIEVE those Biblical lies about homosexuality. Sure, a few people have written articles suggesting that the Bible shouldn’t be taken “literally,” but religion still does.
Until we end those lies – we’ll never be equal. We can’t be equal as long as we’re wrong. Religion makes us wrong.
Katie Murphy
I’m not black, but have met a number of black LGBT supporters. The reasons you find anti-LGBT beliefs in the black community are mostly based on their history as a people,and how the religious white homophobics have courted them.
1. The feeling that they have only recently broken the back of racism, so why tie your wagon to another hated group
2. These people were victims of America’s greatest crime. And they had little if anything, except their churches. So they are very close to the bible and their churches, it was the only thing that sustained them
3. There are a lot of black gay men in the community. But not only are they in the closet, but the whole community is in the closet of denial. so the problem doesn’t even get addressed.
4. The males were particularly denigrated, and called “boy” – anything at all to destroy their perceived manhood. And God help you in the old south if you so much as said the wrong thing to a white woman. Not only was a lynching in store for you, but they were castrated as well
So you end up with a group of people who have a historical imperative of protecting their manhood. Think of how this conflicts with the perceived, and often propagated by the homopobes lie that gays are sissies.
5.. I’ve heard anecdotaly that Black women are very homophobic. Which is very much the opposite of women in the white community, who, since they don’t have to defend machoism, are usually more accepting. But the problem in the black community is the destruction of their family by both the eg southern baptists and independent christian churches, who treated them like cattle. And sold them off with zero interest in their family structure. Combine that with the big mistake of welfare – the man had to leave the family so they didn’t starve.
And to this day, there is a problem, especially for educated black women, to find an educated middle class black male husband.
So this feeds into their homophobia – gay men further reduce the opportunities for a stable marriage / family structure.
What is amazing, but kind of understandable is how people who should directly feel the pain of the gay community are to a significant extent turned against them. Only the satanistic churches of hatred, be they against Jews, Blacks, other minorities, or gays, could have created this kind of situation.
And that includes my former church. Our whole extended family -about 45 people, with only two stuck in the mud holdouts, have left the Catholic church – which has totally lost its way, and gotten worse and worse with a pope who grew up in nazi germany.
You should also. Because, when the money stops flowing, things will begin to change. And not before
Katie Murphy
I do have some inside info btw re the black vote on prop 8 in CA. Since I contributed tens of thousands of $$ to help defeat it.
Both the before vote predictions, and the after vote polling showed that 57-58 % of the black vote was pro prop 8.
Not the 70% + that the media splashed around.
nick
@Shelby: Thanks for acknowledging it. It isn’t fun to come to a site for information and to be constantly reminded that you are a hated party to the publisher and writers the site.Queerty is about as even handed as Fox news when it comes to black people.
BramNash
This quote makes me laugh. I am black and unfortunately gay, and I’ve seen the “gay community’s” true colors, so I feel no compulsion to “join the battle” for gay “rights” or “come out”. I’m inclined to oppose, actually. I know I am not the only one who feels this way either.
B
Andrew wrote, “The PROBLEM is +70% of our fellow citizens BELIEVE those Biblical lies about homosexuality. Sure, a few people have written articles suggesting that the Bible shouldn’t be taken ‘literally,’ but religion still does.”
Andrew, what you are missing is that Christians have a range of beliefs and while some believe the Bible should be taken literally, others don’t. Unfortunately, it is the bible thumpers who make the most noise, so those are the ones you notice. You will never convince the thumpers if you start off by talking about “Biblical lies”. You have a much better chance if you talk about translation errors or human errors in interpretation.
B
M Shane wrote, “I’m not sure where the bizarre info came from that an overwhelming number of black people allowed proposition 8 to pass in Calif. Have you been to California? There aren’t that many black people.”
Polls showed a relatively high vote in favor or Proposition Eight in the black community, but further analysis showed that religion was the most important factor – the high “yes on Eight” numbers for blacks simply reflected a similarly high percentage that are
religious.
While blacks make up about 6.2 percent of California’s total
population, remember that Proposition Eight passed by getting
52.24 percent of the vote.
B
Chitown Kev wrote, “I’ll repeat what Rudy said, I just don’t think that white folks know enough about ‘black homophobia’ to even talk about it. A CNN exit poll can’t tell you shit as compared to the 42 years that I’ve been on this Earth…”
CNN exit polls aside (those are merely an attempt to generate something for a news person to ramble about while waiting for the election results to come in), competently done surveys really can tell you something that you might not know from your 42 years of personal experience as your personal observations are based on a very small sample size. The statistical techniques are essentially the same ones that allow you to determine if (for example) a glass of wine each day reduces the risk of a heart attack – you have to compensate for other factors such as whether teetotalers are more likely to live more stressful lives, and there is a formal mathematical technique for doing that. It makes it possible to find out things you previously didn’t know, including things where personal experience can be very misleading.
According to people I’ve talked to who were involved in the “No on Eight” campaign, the relatively large black vote in favor of Proposition Eight was actually due to religious beliefs, and the black community contains a relatively large number of people who are religious and in religiously conservative churches, hence the high “yes on eight” vote.
This may not make any difference on a personal level, but it is very important for people running a political campaign to overturn Proposition Eight – it is not just a question of “outreach” to a particular community, but of what sort of things to say to influence that community’s average opinion so you get the “most bang for the buck”. It’s not from any desire to bash blacks, but rather to win when an initiative to overturn Proposition Eight is put before the voters – if you don’t manage your financial resources well, you give the opposition an advantage that they would not otherwise have.
Chitown Kev
@B:
Don’t get all scientific with me as if I’m some “dumb nigger.” Of course I have seen many compentently done surveys of homophobia in the black community using rather large sample sizes, taken over periods as large as 25 years, and in various states.
And you do know, of course, that 7 out of 10 blacks that attend church on a regular basis are black women, right?
So in one sense, if the No On 8 people (or whomever they want to call themselves nowadays) are focusing solely on the church-going tendencies in the black community then you are focusing primarily on black female voters. While straight black men do retain some sembelance of religious belief, you are far less likely to find black men in churches (well, that doesn’t apply to gay black men…but that’s a whole different story, lol)
mo
“So this feeds into their homophobia – gay men further reduce the opportunities for a stable marriage / family structure.”
I don’t get that. How would gay men staying closeted and marrying women cause more stable marriages and families? and why would any woman want to be with a man that doesn’t truly want to be with her?
and Bramnash you are just plain sad. Hating yourself will destroy you.
Chitown Kev
@mo:
I couldn’t tell whether that was a troll or what.
Probably some black church queen that goes to a gay bashing church, I figure. I would reserve a special place in hell for those dumb bitches.
Chitown Kev
“So this feeds into their homophobia – gay men further reduce the opportunities for a stable marriage / family structure.”
While I am sensitive to this, as a black gay man, I also don’t appreciate being made into one of the scapegoat sfor some of the problems in the black community.
Speaking for myself as it pertains to some of the black gay men that I have been around, this also feeds off into misogyny by black gay males. I actually don’t have much of a problem getting along with straight black men.
B
Chitown Kev wrote, “Don’t get all scientific with me as if I’m some ‘dumb nigger.'” Rather, I’d suggest you drop the racial slurs as they will not cover up the fact that you came across as yet another mathematically illiterate American.
Looking at some surveys with “large sample sizes” (as you put it) does not mean you have a clue about how to analyze the data.
Chitown Kev
@B:
Uh, didn’t I say compentently done surveys?
I am not about to sit here and argue with you other than the fact that while I am not great at reading all of the math involved, I could hardly be called mathematically illiterate (if the sampling is done right, for example, a small sample size is fine)
B
Chitown Kev wrote, “Uh, didn’t I say compentently done surveys?”
In the post I originally replied to, you said a CNN exit poll, which merely uses a convenience sample. I pointed out some of the things that you can tell from a statistical analysis using a representative sample that you could not tell from personal experience, and you replied with some racial slurs.
Chitown Kev also wrote, “I am not about to sit here and argue with you other than the fact that while I am not great at reading all of the math involved, I could hardly be called mathematically illiterate (if the sampling is done right, for example, a small sample size is fine)”
It’s not sampling that’s the question (a competently done survey will use a representative sample of an appropriate size and report the accuracy of the results). It is rather a question of what hypotheses you want to test.
The one I mentioned was the hypothesis that the relatively high Black vote for Proposition Eight was due to religion and there being a relatively high number of Blacks who are religious in comparison to other ethnic groups. If the events (probability terminology) are H for being homophobic, B for being Black, and R for being religious, then saying that religion is the real cause of the vote means that P(H|BR) = P(HR). In English, this equation states that the probability of being homophobic given being both Black and religious is equal to the probability of being homophobic given being religious – i.e., being Black doesn’t make any difference. If you use R’ to denote not being religious, then similarly, P(H|BR’) = P(H|R’). If both are true, then the probability of being homophobic given that one is black P(H|B) = P(H|R)P(R|B) + P(H|R’)P(R’|B), so the relatively high level of homophobia in the Black community simply reflects the relatively high number of religious people. If you don’t know how to derive this equation, you don’t know enough mathematics to understand the topic.
All the probabilities can be estimated from the surveys, and you can then (using standard statistical techniques) determine the probability that you should reject the hypothesis that religion, not race, is the important factor given the data the survey contains.
This may sound dull and boring to you, but is really is important if you are running a campaign to repeal Proposition Eight because it tells you something about what approach to use to change people’s minds. For one, it tells you that “outreach” efforts don’t have to specifically target Blacks, but rather people who are religious.
Chitown Kev
@B:
Actually, it’s not that dull and boring for me…for instance…
There is a paper somewhere on line where they studied the Michigan vote on Proposal 2. Generally, they found that black Americans voted for the anti-gay marriage amendment at the same rate as Republicans that voted for Bush with the exception of Wayne County, where Detroit is and which has a 75-85% black population.
In other words, Wayne County did not vote along the line of the rest of the black population in Michigan (which, outside of Flint and Saginaw is very scant).
I can’t remember whether the study added an extra variable E (for education) to your equation but the study did show that yes, religion was a factor but it needed to be further controlled by education.
Education accounted for the fact the Wayne County, while mostly black and very religious, voted yes at somewhat lower rates for Proposal 2 than other black populations statewide. So I get what you’re talking about.
In light of that, you may want to add another variable to your equation.
Chitown Kev
@B:
Mind you, only 2 counties voted No on Proposal 2 and both are heavily university counties (University of Michigan and Michigan State but Wayne County has a few universities there too!)
Statewide, Proposal 2 passed with 59% of the total vote, 60% of whites statewide voted for it, and 59% of blacks statewide.
O f course, you could even add more variables to to it (if I remember correctly, there was another variable to acvcount for having gay and lesbian neighbors).
B
Chitown Kev wrote, “Mind you, only 2 counties voted No on Proposal 2 and both are heavily university counties (University of Michigan and Michigan State but Wayne County has a few universities there too!) Statewide, Proposal 2 passed with 59% of the total vote, 60% of whites statewide voted for it, and 59% of blacks statewide.”
In California, the anti-same-sex marriage proposition passed with
between 52 and 53 percent of the vote, while the Black vote was nearly 60% in favor of the ban, with most of that excess being due to religion. Religion, BTW, tends to have more of an influence among the less educated parts of the population, but education levels are not relevant to planning a political campaign a few years down the road – it takes decades to fix an education problem.
You may be better off spending your efforts talking to religious leaders – if you can raise doubts in their minds, they will not be as willing to send homophobic messages to their congregations.
BTW, on some early anti-gay political campaigns, they found that people were less willing to vote for an anti-gay initiative if they personally knew someone who was gay. Having gay or lesbian neighbors can help as you point out, but there is nothing a political campaign can do to get people to have more gay and lesbian neighbors.
B
Chitown Kev wrote, “In light of that, you may want to add another variable to your equation.”
Which shows that you didn’t understand it! The equation represented how to express the hypothesis that religion alone accounted for the relatively high vote in favor of Proposition Eight among Blacks. You need to express such a hypothesis in mathematical terms in order to test it using standard statistical techniques.