© Breeze Vincinz
I was having a cup of tea with a friend of mind recently and we began to peruse the current political, social and even spiritual landscapes of the African American LGBT community here in Los Angeles. A fellow comrade once mused that he could feel some sort of malevolent ethereal pulsation within the community very much like fauna can tell when a storm is coming to their flora. In his mind’s eye, he could see a common thread that tied every incongruity, absurdity and broken collaboration that has occurred over the past year or so together, and like a blind man using a fence made of knotted rope to feel his way down a path, he felt that each tether was bringing us closer and closer to some sort of spiritual Armageddon for Black Lesbians and Gays. My friend and I could not claim the same “Cassandra” complex but we were in agreement that when/if the history books ever document this particular moment in time about our contributions to the greater social scheme, this would most definitely be our “Before” picture; this would be the rhetorical dark days before the dawn.
Without adding any more insult to the multi-tiered injuries going on I will say in the broadest of terms that there are substantial factions within the African American LGBT community that have surreptitiously placed themselves in diametric opposition to each other. And while my fellow comrade might blame some sort of cosmic retribution, my friend and I think it’s more of a case of overactive human ego on every one’s part. But who knows, maybe it’s both. Maybe we’re just reaping the piles and piles of self righteousness, self hate, self loathing, inactivity, immobility, macho posing, DL supporting, racist, misogynistic, materialistic, egotistical bullshit that we’ve been sowing for years now.
What I do know is that… when Proposition 8 passed and placed a ban on same sex marriages, one of the main people that I most sorely blamed for specifically not educating the African American community on the importance of the issue… was myself. Now in no way, shape or form do I think that the African American community was solely responsible for the passage of Proposition 8 but I do think that the information that was filtered through our community was highly flawed and toxic and I for one did absolutely nothing to alter that flow of information or even stop it. At the time I was in agreement with the majority of my heterosexual counterparts in believing that there were much more pressing matters to attend to within the community. I was also in agreement with my Caucasian counterparts in assuming that California, arguably the gayest state in the Union (outside of maybe Florida who gets extra points for having the most phallic shaped state in the union), would easily allow same-sex marriages to exist. I was wrong. I was flat out wrong on both counts.
So when I’m talking about the state of disarray that the African American LGBT community might be in, I have to factor in my own culpability in that because… I’m not talking about “them”, I’m talking about “us”… and as a whole, “We”… fucked up. “We” didn’t step up to the plate, “We” are bickering with each other trying to claim the title of omnipotent spokesmodel for all Black “Gaydom”, and most notably as of date… “We” are not listening to our youth and “We” are not learning from our elders.
Talking with my friend I imagined the state of African American LGBT affairs here in Los Angeles to the part in “The Wizard of Oz” when Dorothy and the gang looked behind the curtain and found out that the wizard wasn’t really a wizard but a lonely old dude trying to do the best he can. There is a certain level of transparency that a lot of organizations that serve the Black LGBT community here in Los Angeles do not operate under and much like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” there have been ambitious, young “go getters” who have peeked behind that curtain and have made the absolute horrible realization that… it is not wizards or gods who have sustained our community, but flawed human beings who have had the wherewithal and maybe just a little luck to maintain all these years. And while they most certainly deserve our respect, they just as similarly deserve our scrutiny. And while it is the obnoxiousness of the Dorothys out there that needs to be quelled, it is their ambition that should be nurtured.
And whether this influx of ego driven acrobatics that has played out over the past couple of years is the result of our community’s full concession into the Gordon Gekko Reganomics whose initial bittersweet blooming stages were caught in Jennie Livingston’s “Paris Is Burning” or some unquantifiable cosmic retribution, I think the one thing that we all should be striving for at this point… is reprieve.
While we were bickering and bitching and having pissing contests to see whose experience and/or eagerness could go further... we lost the legal right to get married, we lost a quantifiable portion of one of our most treasured pride celebrations, and most importantly we stand to lose actual lives as more and more of us feel as if there is no quantifiable support system for the Black LGBT and are deciding to slide back into the closet without acknowledging our HIV status and/or the homophobic incongruities that we might encounter further encouraging an environment ripe for hate crimes against us. According to Kim Pearson, a professor at The College of New Jersey, there were 659 stories in major newspapers about the 1998 gay-bias murder of Caucasian Matthew Shepard. When African American Sakia Gun was the victim of a gay-bias murder in 2003, there were only 21 articles written in the seven month period after her attack. Numbers like these could not be encouraging for the brother or sister dealing with coming forth with their own sexual identity.
I just feel as that at this point there are several factions wanting to take the lead and be our Gay Black Hope, be the hero who could thwart the evil doers out there and transform us into a healthy community. Well... to quote Tina Turner, I just don’t think we need another hero; I don’t think we need a singular representative voice. I think all of us, young and old, need to be accountable for what we do, why we’re doing it and how we do it. I think we should always be cognizant of the fact that there will always be some young “whip snapper” coming up behind us and pulling back our curtains to see what we’re doing and we shouldn’t take that as an act of disrespect but an opportunity to teach and maybe even learn. I think the visibility that we need to have cannot be facilitated through one voice; it has to be individually in our homes, in our churches, in our playing fields, in our jobs, in our governments, it’s going to take all of us. I don’t think it’s necessarily a hero we need more so than the strength, the courage and the wisdom it takes to save ourselves.
But alas, I do believe in the idea of “community” and the strength behind numbers. The trick to that is, however, you can’t have many unless each one is committed to the task at hand. Or rather, me and my friend can’t, as a community of two, patronize Starbucks if we don’t know what we’re thirsty for individually. Thusly, The Black LGBT Community can’t fully support the efforts against Proposition 8 if we don’t know what we emotionally thirst for individually.
But I have noticed in the past couple of years, that there has been a collective thirst building in those of us “out” LGBT people of color. So the trick to that is to agree on how to get what we need, where to get it, and to allow people who follow us the same access.
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