My mother went to segregated schools in Southwest Arkansas in the 60s.  She recalled anxiety about going to the white schools after desegregation, given the racism and bigotry that some of her peers experienced who dared to actualized King’s dream… perhaps all too optimistically.  To be certain, Brown vs. The Board of Education wasn’t so much about blacks dying to be with whites as it was the desire for equal resources… and interestingly, in the wake of Proposition 8 passing in California, I’m struck with analogous, if uncomfortable, feelings about trying to appeal to straight America for rights to “marry”.  Especially in the aftermath of Yes on 8 passing, and hearing direct reports from black friends, most of them strong advocates AGAINST 8, being harassed and called “niggers” by white gays, I’m beginning to question my allegiance to any unified queer/LGBT community at all.

My mother did “just fine” in her black school, despite unequal resources.  To boot, she graduated without the feelings of self-doubt and stereotype dysfunction that many blacks suffered who experienced desegregation in the earlier years.  Desegregation, for many, assumed assimilation to an American way that didn’t respect the broader cultural education that my mother received at Walker High School, and that I didn’t receive at nearby Taylor High School some 25 years later. It seems that the American way is to have shame in difference, to advocate that we all melt down to some non-distinct “humanoid” so as to avoid the (re)memory of racism and its historical and continued social and economic impress.  It seems that people really want to be as much like privileged, straight, white men as possible. We get pissed when we’re denied such privilege, without calling into question the hierarchical necessity requiring someone, some group, to “bottom”. As long as we aren’t the ones getting screwed, all is okay. We seem to learn nothing from history.  In this Land of Opportunity, I’m sometimes not sure how we fare better trying to prove ourselves worthy of a piece of the American pie.  I’ve had my taste of it.  It’s as bittersweet as the experience of being black and gay in America. Obama wins, No on 8 loses, and blacks are either “blamed” or “credited” for both.  We can’t seem to do anything the white way, can we?

Yeah… I’m admittedly pissed about the surprise and awe at Prop 8 passing. Despite my hopefulness I was skeptical from jump.  Money talks and homophobia didn’t die with Ellen or Will and Grace.  Mormons and others invested lots of money to pimp communities of color into fearing “gay marriage” with their ads about contagious debauchery.  (Straight) Marriage in countries and states that have legalized it are rather unaffected by the extension of these rights to the gays, but in America, we assimilate to discriminate, so it’s no surprise that privileged whites would boast “counting on” disenfranchised Americans to show their commitment to “family values”, even as African-Americans remain jobless, in substandard schools, and are first class citizens only when the prison industrial complex, AIDS statistics, or homicides are markers of success.  I converted to Mormonism as a teen.  They care only about salvation insofar as it promotes predetermined, egoistic truths about being the right righteous people going to the white kindgom of heaven.  Guise such religiousity with an elusive “protect family” campaign, place a flyer in the mail, or send a voicemail with Obama saying he does not support gay marriage (despite the complexity of his stance) and you can sale anything to black people, right? Yes on 8 proponents understand cultural marketing. No on 8, for all its fundraising efforts, dropped the disco ball.

I have been teaching in Northern California since August 2008.  In Humboldt County where I currently reside (though I voted in TX where I live with my partner and wish to hold officials accountable) Yes on 8 received only 40% of the vote– a sign that our organizing efforts locally had substantial impact.  While I didn’t have money to offer these organizing efforts, I do write, I am partnered, and I’m crazy about the guy. The idea of not being able to protect our shared emotional, financial, and sentimental investments is a huge deal to me, so I created a chapbook of poems about the universality of loving and sold enough copies to offer some financial support to Marriage Equality. I am not unlike other blacks (gay and straight) who put money and resources into the fight against Prop 8, whose (black) community got scapegoated as the reason for 8 passing.  We have long been trying to work alongside white allies, even when they’ve attempted to color this issue green… and I don’t mean organic.  At the end of the day, white gays are still white and benefit, knowingly and not, from white privilege.  Fortunately, I’m honored to know white allies who are as upset by some of the racist scapegoating as I am.  The task of having anti-racist conversation among white LGBT folk has been shamefully put on the back-burner in order to make way for valiant attempts to prove to Americans that gays are just like straight people… just gay.  It’s a terrifying delusion in which to invest emotional, economic, and political resources.

8 passed because proponents of No ignored calls by activists like myself to diversity their messaging to include more people of color.  8 passed because black people have an array of more urgent concerns, many of which have connectedness to marriage equality though NO on 8 failed to illuminate these connections (e.g., AIDS, immigration, adoption and parenting, economics, property rights, etc… are all connected to marriage equality).  White privilege is being furious about being a step away from “full-citizenship” as an American except for the right to marry, where many or most blacks (even married heterosexuals) are regularly confronted with reminders of second-class citizenship based on the color of their skin (note: an Obama election doesn’t change this).

White (gay) privilege is the ability to reduce the “concept” of equality to partner-choice while ignoring the reality that blacks, at one point in America were banned from marrying each other at all. It was believed that citizens “married” and by virtue of being enslaved, there was no good sense, no real love, between one piece of property and another.  Until the white gay community begins to regularly grapple with its own institutional racism in America, until discussions about equality regularly speak about the intersections of racism, sexism, classism, alongside gay rights, LGBT rights will continue to be perceived as special rights for special whites.  It’s easy for my family to question Ellen’s understanding of any connection between her right to marry and the Civil Rights they historically associate with African-Americans, a bit harder to tell me, their brother, son, or uncle, that I don’t understand or value a connection between the two. Maybe married gay blacks are still black, so marriage doesn’t alter the unfortunate overdetermination of skin.

To be sure, the issues are complicated.  Activists like Jasmine Cannick do as much damage as racist gay scapegoaters by essentializing black people as disinterested in and unconcerned with Marriage Equality; which is a huge slap in the face to the 30% of blacks who voted NO and whose efforts prior to voting were among the most passionate, if slighted by the overarching Marriage Equality movement. Not voting “No on 8″ as some kind of political protest against white gays, is as selfish and self-defeating a move as not supporting homophobic black institutions– ones which I believe Cannick makes conscience compromise around. Whether or not black gays were marrying at high rates, many of us still believed in the right to do so as a matter of full-citizenship and equality.  Essentialization of black people on either side underestimates the diversity of opinion in the black community. There are, in fact, privileged black LGBT couples who see “marriage” as an authenticating measure of equality, however short-sighted. There are others more concerned about their next meal.

In the days following the 2008 Election, I was left with bittersweet feelings about America.  Happy that Obama won and will come to represent, if only symbolically, a nation’s investment in change that I didn’t believe was possible in my lifetime, saddened by a Yes on 8 campaign that married the almighty dollar with fear of gay contagion and called upon “illegal immigrants” and “niggers” to show their allegiance to great American family values.  More insidious was my own home state’s (Arkansas) decision to ban unmarried couples (straight or gay) from adopting children.  Morality-based legislation is a dangerous slippery slope that smells a lot like an American fundamentalist pie, if you ask me.  How bout them apples?

Ultimately, I’m not sure “marriage” is for me, though I’m proud to advocate the right for those who wish to have it, if for no other reason than it hasn’t hurt anyone when allowed (by any measure I’ve seen).  I’m growing to develop interest in valuing “domestic partnership” and expanding benefits under that name on a federal level– something I’m hopeful Obama may help to achieve during his tenure as President.  In all truth, I like the way “domestic partnership” sounds.  It sounds like the potentiality for equality between two partners who invest in and honor their own valuation of family values.  It does not, as the term marriage seems to do, conjure up notions of anyone submitting to the will of thier husband– a sexist and hierarchical notion that is inherent in notions of traditional marriage. Watch the 30 minute clip promoting Yes on 8 to see how shamelessly sexist the preservation of marriage is, how it vilifies single moms, dads, and the children they raise.  You’ll see how love is reduced to the reproductive potentiality of opposite parts– as if people ONLY marry to have children who they’ll raise as happy heterosexuals perpetuating the human race in a world confronting serious overpopulation issues and affecting everything from the economy to global warming.

I also think that before I give another black cent to a Marriage Equality campaign, that I’ll either ask that my funds be earmarked towards specific outreach to African-American communities (and communities of color) OR consider offering more direct support to organizations like the National Black Justice Coalition, despite thier own brand of black elitism and disconnectedness with poor and working class black LGBT people. If the personal is political, and there are far too few institutions that reflect the intersectionality of being both black and gay, one can feel a bit hopeless.  I refuse to become uninspired.  I do believe in “rights” for LGBT folk of all colors. I don’t believe that all LGBT people believe as I do or even care about LGBT people of color. Some make it clear that they don’t want us in their gayhborhoods, businesses, or at their clubs.  To that end, I hope that the passing of Yes on 8 and the necessary illumination of ugly in the LGBT community creates some long overdue conversations about racism among gays… but I’m not looking to HRC for the solution.

Poet Essex Hemphill once wrote:

I want to start an organization to save my life/ If Whales, snails, dogs, cats, Chrysler, and Nixon can be saved/ The lives of black men are priceless and can be saved.

Essex Hemphill’s appeal was not to white, white gay, or black America, and yet he did not live to see the organization actualized that would save his life– falling victim, like so many others, to AIDS in 1995.  I, like Essex, want to believe that I offer a foundation on which to build an institution that would honor my full self– my black self, my gay self, my loving self.  The process of building an organization to save my life is also about “calling out” those organizations and institutions that claim to “speak for” me, but do not hold the promise of my full citizenship:  Neither America, Black America, nor Gay America offer a resting place for those of us weary from fighting on multiple fronts.  Tonight, I am simply tired. But I am willing to entertain rights honoring my partnership, whether they carry the term “marriage” or not.  I am perhaps embracing “domestic partnership” as an affirmation that separate and equal is the American way, even when it’s sugarcoated by black presidency, a symbolic if misleading rainbow flag, or equal sign.

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