...Feels like I've gone through the cynicism and come out the other side.
As a bisexual woman, I came out with the idea that the glorious history of Stonewall et al was the history of my people, and that gay liberation had something real to do with my own liberation. As an out queer woman, I felt that I was part of that lineage. Imagine my surprise when I found out I was supposedly a lying nympho traitor. (See the work of Paula Rust for more on lesbian attitudes about bisexuals.) It hurt, angered, and alienated me.
In the end, I simmered down and recognized that I would be wise to be part of creating a social/political identity for bis that didn't count on gay people as 100% allies. Because while we have some things in common, we are not the same. I learned not to expect to be accepted as a first-class citizen in gay-dominated spaces, and I learned that I'd have to make a case for myself if I wanted to stay there. I learned to stand on my own feet and stop implicitly allowing gay men and lesbians to be gatekeepers of queer authenticity. What I'm saying is, I grew up already.
I see a parallel in some of the rhetoric around black voters and Prop 8. Coming of age in the seventies and eighties, in a city like mine, any white kid gets used to singing "We Shall Overcome" at school assemblies. The movement led by Dr. King becomes paradigmatic of all civil rights movements. It's practically mythic. The phrase "ur-text" comes to mind. So anyone working in a civil rights capacity is bound to feel (at least at times) like a spiritual descendant of the King era.
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For white GLBTs to be rejected by black people, therefore, can be particularly painful. Because black people get assumed by white people to be the arbiters of whether something's authentically part of the King legacy. My gay white friends thought, consciously or subconsciously, that the liberation history of black civil rights was in some way part of their own history of liberation. But, as they believed themselves to have been roughly informed, they were wrong.
It's not just a matter of "oh, liberality, blah blah, we white GLBTs should be able to take those black people for granted," though I sure wouldn't deny that there's some of that. (Also, the anti-8 campaign was plain stupid.) But it's not all that facile; there's also, I think, some deep, ugly emotional stuff getting stirred up here among the GLBTs in the wake of Prop 8. I'm using words like "lineage" and "descendant" carefully here, because we're talking in many cases about people who've been rejected by their families, or who have had good reason to fear rejection by their families. There's a resonance. And it makes people weird out. If they're Dan Savage, who's not exactly a clear thinker to begin with, it makes 'em entirely crazy. You get temper tantrums.
But you know what? That's too bad. We need to grow up already.
One thing we haven't addressed here, is how black people, mostly through the Civil Rights Movement, have become the most identifiable collective icon of struggle. Thus, I don't see the comparisons between gay rights and the CRM as an attempt to insult, but really an attempt to identify, and to reach for the most striking and poignant analogy.
Now, black folks need to be humble here, instead of proprietary, and here is why--we do the same damn thing. Think about the ancient tradition of the black clergy identifying themselves as the America's Hebrews, of thinking of MLK as a sort of Moses, and his allusions to the Promised Land. Think about the Black Israelites. More disturbing, I can't tell you how many rallies I went to at Howard designed to memorialize the "Black Holocaust." Which was fine up to this point--unlike folks in the gay community, I saw several speakers at those rallies claim that the "Black Holocaust" was ten times worse, and thus deserved more attention.
Now, there are reasons why that happened, but the fact of the matter is that it was ugly. We need to guard against our sense of virtue, against our own self-righteousness.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
I think there are few things more pointless than comparing pain and victimhood. It's completely different and exactly the same. Just another paradox of being human.
I think there are few things more pointless than comparing pain and victimhood
KevDog only thinks that because he's never known true suffering.
I am with KevDog on this
I also don't think that comparisons line up with the gay marriage debate. I am not trying to be funny here but when those Civil Rights Icons/Black Power Protagonists made analogies to other struggles whether they were on par or not they had many of the same similarities whether it be slavery, mass killings, oppression so on and so forth.
Now if you can find me an instance where black folks compared the miscegeny laws against interracial marriage to a holocaust or slavery situation then I might be interested in the justification but if you can't I still don't see how the Civil Rights movement links up to the Gay Marriage movement taking nothing away from either one. I believe the majority of black folks have stood up for gay folks when it came to hate crimes laws and workplace discrimination laws which infringe on their civil rights much in the same way we had our rights infringed upon. And on that level I don't think anyone would object or have objected to invoking the Civil Rights movement. I have already said too much about gay marriage vs civil unions and whether any actual rights are with held in the latter so Im going to just leave it there.
I would like to amend my previous comment. It should read:
KevDog only thinks that because as a white Christian male he's never known true suffering.
(I have no idea if KevDog is any of those things, but I realize now that one can't let accuracy stand in the way of a stupid joke)
The human struggle for liberty and equality is universal though the dynamics of such struggles are widely diverse. The struggle for liberty and equality in one place, or with one group, may be vastly different than another but they are connected by that common thread---that very human instinct---to fight for freedom and equality.
The many stories of struggle and triumph are a source of understanding and inspiration for many of us. Blacks should feel honored that gay men and women look to their struggle as a source of inspiration. I don't think their use of an analogy to the civil rights struggle is meant to insult the black community, but rather to illustrate the fact they too are in a struggle for equality. That shared sense of struggle is what binds us after all.
Perhaps this why the gay community is vehemently antagonistic toward black community re: Prop8. That powerful sense that they shared an understanding of what it means to struggle is gone; the common thread appears to have broken, or worse, never existed. I can imagine that is a very painful sort of disappointment.
Having said that, I think the gay community ought not to jump to the conclusion that they don't have the empathy of the black community at large (the stat debate should give them pause).
I can't believe I got it wrong again!
My comment should read:
KevDog only thinks that because as a heterosexual white Christian male he's never known true suffering.
(and now I ban myself)
Everybody, it seems these days, wants to be viewed as a victim. Evangelical Christians talk about themselves like they're a hair's breath from being thrown to lions in the coliseums; and bisexuals want to be viewed as civil rights pioneers fighting oppression by sleeping with every person at the bar.
Gay folks should be allowed to marry the same as straight couples. However, that post you printed makes a mockery of the whole issue and makes it obvious why people can't take this seriously or can reasonably support Prop 8. Seriously; black men and women were getting their heads caved in for trying to vote. That's a civil rights movement. Many folks carrying the gay marriage banner around, comparing their efforts to MLK, singing 'we shall overcome' - are idiots. Further, a bisexual man is a gay man who will fuck anything and a bisexual woman is a straight woman who will fuck anything. From the Selma Bridge to Lindsey Lohan - the term 'civil rights movement' has lost a little of it's original meaning.
Peep: could you explain that comment some?
I don't know about KevDog, but up-front, I've never known "true suffering," meaning, I haven't suffered an inordinate amount of emotional or physical pain.
Still, if I were, why would I then need to compare it to some other people's suffering, to find if it somehow trumps their suffering (and how would I know?) -- why would I need to validate through an abstract comparison what already would be so self-evident?
Could it be that those who have truly suffered are the most likely to transcend it because they have to -- it's a matter of their emotional survival. Could it be that it's the latter generations, those who haven't "truly suffered," but see the effect of that suffering in their elders' lives and can't do anything to assuage it, who find it hard to let go, who find the need to compare?
That's some brave stuff to write TNC, thanks for that.
Peep, I think you just outlined the point of this post; namely that only certain groups have enough "cred" to claim that they have ever suffered. It ultimately degenerates into self-righteousness.
Nathan exhibits a subtle and sensitive understanding of gender identity. I'll take his opinions quite seriously and subscribe to his newsletter, if possible.
Nathan,
I'm sorry, but that is the most shallow and pathetic understanding of bisexuality. You've basically made the original poster's point. Bisexuality doesn't imply nymphomania. It doesn't imply that they want to be in both kinds of relationships at once. It doesn't even necessarily imply that they're equally attracted to both genders. And because a lot of people don't understand this, it means that bisexuals often catch flack from both sides. If they're in homosexual relationships, they get crap from homophobic bigots. If they're in heterosexual relationships, they get crap from some members of the gay and lesbian community for not being "real" queers.
Sexual preference is a spectrum, not a binary and/or. Some people are more attracted to the opposite gender, but find some members of their own gender attractive. For some it's the opposite. And trying to sort out just where you feel you are can be a difficult and painful process, usually because of the rigid definitions that society would like to apply to the subject.
Bisexuality is just not as simple as you'd like to make it out to be.
What Jordan said. It's not binary; it's not digital. It's an analog spectrum -- a rainbow of attraction. Most of us are simply socialized to one end or the other.
But what I really want to know is why the degree of "suffering" matters? Intolerant societies that don't accept the rainbow of folks is the problem. Intolerance is the wrong; it doesn't matter what costume it wears.
I agree with the sentiment, guarding against "righteousness," or self-righteousness. But you know what I think the first move in that direct would be? Now that the initial euphoria of Obama's election and election eve speech, I think we have to acknowledge that he's not black.
That is, that Obama is not only black, but white too, and raised by white people. I think it is interesting that you have posted a comment about bisexuality. The writer complains that that she doesn't fit within the dominant categories of sexuality, and in the same way multi-racial people don't fit in the categories of race. Both are forced to choose, and the refusal to choose means you have no one on your side, and that you are ostracized by the "owners" of the categories themselves.
"Now that the initial euphoria of Obama's election and election eve speech, I think we have to acknowledge that he's not black.
That is, that Obama is not only black, but white too, and raised by white people."
I can't figure out, for the life of me, why this keeps coming up. He is who he says he is, no? If Bill Richardson had won would he have to acknowledge--given his lineage--that he isn't really Latino?
Hang the hell on, Dan. Obama is black. I'm getting really tired of people prescribing identities for others. Obama identifies himself as a black man, and we need to respect that. Just like the woman who commented about being bisexual has to deal with certain folks in the gay community telling her what she is and isn't, a virtual industry has been created around making Obama anything but black. Trying to negate the identity of a bisexual (whose sexual orientation is not a choice, BTW) is as unfair and useless as trying to negate the identity of a biracial person, regardless of how they see themselves.
If he weren't president, he wouldn't be able to catch a cab; if he let his hair grow out it would probably look like wool (peep those Occidental College pictures of him with the Kanye West shades and the 'fro); and, most importantly, when he looks in the mirror he sees a black man. If that's good enough for him, why the hell isn't that good enough for everyone else? Can we please--PLEASE--stop acting like this man's identity is something that's up for debate?
Have to agree that it's not going to be useful to debate who has been repressed more. Basically every minority group has legitimate complaints about how they have been treated in the past and how they are treated now. I don't think anyone would ever be able to calculate the suffering of the closet (and pretending to be someone/something you are not) vis-a-vis the suffering of Jim Crow. I just don't think it's possible. Maybe a surface glance would suggest blacks had it worse, but when you get into things - I just don't think it's worthwhile.
If that's good enough for him, why the hell isn't that good enough for everyone else?
Because, we all love him so much we want to claim him as our own?
Myself, I'm thinking Barack is Jewish.
Something that Nathan's comment brings to mind, and that I've seen all over the place. Why is it that people are so willing to deny the history of institutionalized harassment and violence against queer folks?
The opening of Milk has some very moving scenes showing gay men being rounded up by the police for, well, for going to a bar, for being in a space with others like them. This archival footage fits well with a later scene, part of the acted out drama, of cops going into one of the bars in the Castro and busting heads. Yeah, the cops would invade gay bars just to fag bash. And, these weren't isolated incidents.
And let's not forget where the pink triangle that was an emblem of gay rights movement, and of ACT-UP, came from.
I don't know if people just aren't aware of how the institutions of Heterosexual domination operated, or if they're willing to erase those histories because gay people are "nasty."
"Now that the initial euphoria of Obama's election and election eve speech, I think we have to acknowledge that he's not black.
That is, that Obama is not only black, but white too, and raised by white people."
Actually, I interpreted this post as saying, or intimating creatively, that in the same way outside people do not have the right to determining Obama's identity for him, people do not have more right than a bisexual to determine the identity of the bisexual in question. It's the Derrida-ian zombie analogy -- illustrating how someone with bits of both identities suffers from being both and neither (and how reality is simply NOT an automatic binary switch). I did NOT read it as the typical "Obama's really not black" statement -- Obama was just an example here, not the main point.
(Me, I would have thought "will fuck anything" would by default negate the "straight person who" part of the original offensive statement to begin with, but that's a different and very long debate. Ah, these lovely rigid Victorian-era labels!)
(Just ignore those typos please; I'm tired and multitasking. Suffice to say, I don't think the poster was trying to deny Obama's blackness, or even raise that debate -- just trying to point out the flexible nature of binaries by using an example.)
Nate's point was mired in useless stereotype, but I understand what he was saying. While there are definitely parallels, the struggle is not the same because white queers have the advantage of privilege on their side. Again, you cannot co-opt a movement while ignoring the racial issues plaguing your own group, nor can you simply assume that The Black Community (tm) will feel your pain and align themselves with you when you've done nothing to reach out. Someone mentioned before that the glaring lack of effort in POC communties to get out the No vote may have played a part as well, but no one wants to acknowledge that.
As the partner of a bisexual, this poster's comment resonated with me, except for one part: she dismisses the gay movement because she outgrew it.
Outgrowing a movement is natural - like leaving your parents' home. That doesn't eliminate the real value in the movement/community's ability to foster young homosexuals into productive citizens. People are quick to point out the differences between the black and the gay experience, but one has yet to be mentioned.
All sexual minorities are intrinsically orphans, even if they have very positive relationships with their families. Why? Because they were raised by straight people (with few exceptions). The gay community has gone from primarily an equal rights movement to a lost and found movement, ensuring that gay youth aren't "lost in the cracks".
Just because she's no longer lost doesn't mean she should deride the support structure that helped her survive.
I'm with Jordan and Zic. Personal concepts of identity (national, sexual, racial, ethnic, etc) get steamrolled by the larger "put on a uniform and march" cut and slice approach so useful to concentrating political power for one faction or another, especially a faction under fire.
Sure, this is useful on a practical level to band together to get things done but a lot of ugliness gets dredged up whenever orthodoxy demands obedience. End result being that if your identity isn't popular enough to get a parade or a its own PAC, it's pretty easy to feel edited out, at the least. Hence, bi folks are told they're kidding themselves, hapa kids get one-dropped into whatever genes hit the surface hardest and we all end up forgetting that it's just human nature to want to hybridize those genes (I don't have the data on humans but in every other species, mutts live longer).
Maybe on the way to "can't we all just get along?" we can work on "can't you not hate me for not pulling my identity off the rack?"
Oh and in this whole Blacks vs. Gays blog battle has anyone mentioned Tongues Untied yet? (http://www.amazon.com/Tongues-Untied-Marlon-Riggs/dp/B00114XLZA) A little arty, a little dated, yeah, but a nice multi-angled take on being a minority of a minority without denying the pain or the humor of real life. Real, real human stuff.
Apologies if someone already threw that out there before, not the most avid comment scavenger. Usually just here for the poems and football... ;)
I largely disagree with Nathan's assessment of bi-sexuals, though there is so much in the popular culture that makes one believe this. It seems like every hot woman on Howard Stern is asked about what she has done with another woman. Even the behavior of stupid drunk girls at the bar who try to be the center of attention by kissing their female friend reinforces this.
On another note, I had visited a feminist site a few weeks back and noticed the divisiveness within the gay community, though this very well may have been more activists fighting for air than a larger trend. But the female blogger largely dismissed the point of view of a gay blogger by saying he was privileged. He was white, cisgendered (never heard that term before) and male.
The Other J.C.:
*Some* white queers have privilege on their side. Many do not. In a lot of instances, very effeminite men and very masculine women hit normative ideas of "other" right in the mouth simply by walking around trying to live their lives. Doubly so for transpersons, especially ones who can't pass well.
Also, many white queers lose not only status but familial structure and support (both emotional and economic) by coming out. I'll use my own life as an example.
I am 37. I just became a CPA in 2008. I finished my MS in 2007. I am applying currently for Ph.D. programs, and will be in my early 40s when I go onto the job market. I am about a decade behind career-wise where I would be were I heterosexual.
When I came out, I was forced to drop out of the private liberal arts college I attended my freshman year. I lost all financial support and lost most ties to my immediate family, and suddenly had to figure out how the fuck to not become homeless. At the time, in 1990, there was no version of the United Negro College Fund for GLBT kids.
In many ways, I was worse off than I would have been had I not had white middle-class privilege to begin with. My background did not prepare me for a successful blue-collar career, since that had never been the plan.
I did figure it all out (hah, yeah right), eventually, since the choice was between survival and getting eaten. And eventually I did put myself through school, etc. I do think that there are many ways in which I am better off for having had those experiences. But I still would rather not have lost those family ties (the emotional ones).
And that doesn't change the fact that I've spent my 30s competing directly with people in their 20s, and that I'll be in my 40s before I can start trying to work towards a positive net worth.
Please bear with me on this. The personal concepts of identity theme is very interesting to me. I'm in total agreement with the posters who expressed views along the lines of Jordan and Zic. We should accept the identities that people chose for themselves. I do wonder if this can ever be taken too far. The example that comes to mind is that 90s rap group Young Black Teenagers, a bunch of white kids who if I remember correctly expressed that they "felt black". Even if my memory of YBT is inaccurate, you take my point right?
Also, it seems to me in alot of the comments advocating a broader concept of identity that there is a hostility toward the concept of labels. Is that warranted? Isn't the human instinct to label just a coping mechanism for processing the vast amount of information that people take in daily. Aren't labels also a shorthand for communication? A way to make sure we're all on the same page. Linguistic rituals, if that makes any sense. For example, boy meets girl. Girl tells boy she is straight. Is it wrong that boy then discounts other girls as his competition for this particular girl's affections?
I hope no one was offended by any of the above. Just thinking out loud and looking for input.
TNC, thanks for pulling a worthwhile quote out of the fray and adding your consistently excellent thoughts to it. You and ELC helped me see my reverence of MLK as a marriage-equality supporter/activist in a clearer light; knowledge that can only help the movement (not to mention me, personally).
ELC: As a younger lesbian (27, only been Out for three years), I was really sad to hear about your experiences with lesbians in the movement in the 70s and 80s. I grew up hearing the phrase "LGBT" (and later, LGBTQQ, and now jokingly LGBTQQWTFBBQ); it wasn't until I hit the books that I came to understand the in-fighting in the movement and that that we hadn't started out as one big happy Family. I damn sure hope that bisexuals getting involved today don't have stories similar to the beginning of yours and will do my best to make sure I don't contribute any of that bull, as well as speak up when I can.
The fact that, as you said, emotions and energy are high after Prop 8 and Obama makes it all the more important to remember all the ways we have a long way to go and learn from where we've been. (Oh, and Dan Savage--what the hell was that? I think he made up some ground in a post-P8 appearance on Colbert last year and briefly discussed the falseness of the Blacks vs. Gays thing, can't remember if TNC posted that, but still. Lame.)
TNC: I wish you better than luck in your statistics research on Prop 8. That is vital and necessary work and as you've already done so much to keep my eyes open on this issue, I expect great things.
Can I just say for the record I find most claims to victimhood about as obnoxious as most accusations of privilege?
It's not to say that they're not useful concepts, but too often, rather than being used as a starting place for growth, they're used to shut folk down.
Margaret,
You may want to check out an anthology from the early 1990s entitled "Bi Any Other Name". Even though I identify as gay and not bi, I found that I identified a lot more with the sense of otherness that many of the bi authors wrote about in terms of their relationship to the overall gay community.
I lived in Amherst / Northampton Mass in the 1990s. In the early part of that decade, the more radical section of the lesbian community broke off from Northampton Pride and started their own march. The reason? The addition of the word "Bisexual" to the title "Lesbian and Gay Pride March."
It was an interesting time to be poor, gay, and too smart for your own damn good.
@Margaret -- in his defense, Dan Savage was pretty fucking funny on Colbert. (I'm still miffed. I DON'T KNOW WHY I have this compulsion to argue against myself all the damn. But it's true -- I'm miffed and I don;t think it was enough, but I do think HE thought he was trying to build a bridge of some sort.)
@AMT -- my own issue is not that labels should not exist -- they are, as you point out, obviously inevitable. I have a problem, though, with the refusal to acknowledge that labels are also malleable, and change over time -- and a related problem, when they are used to slap down people who don't exactly "fit" and tell them that they either don't exist or are pathological liars -- as if human existance were a set of rigid binaries. Which is isn't. And pre-Victorian westerners, including the Puritans!! were far better at recognizing this (Puritan society was hardly a bastion of gay-friendliness and support, obviously, but they believed that homosexual activity was a temptation to all, but just to varying degrees depending on the individual. (So much so that they didn't even have the word "homosexual," which was an awkward, chimera-esque, half Greek half Latin term coined in 1892.) There has to be a happy medium, don't you see?
(And people saying they are straight when they're not is a whole other issue, and not entirely admirable -- but, a corollary: Wouldn't it be more helpful if these people were given the OPTION of saying, without fear of abuse and violence, that they were in fact bisexual or whatever term correctly applies? Then your hypothetical boy would have a far clearer picture of what he was getting into with hypothetical girl, no?)
"I DON'T KNOW WHY I have this compulsion to argue against myself all the damn."
"All the damn TIME." I'm sorry. I'm very, very sleepy.
Jay C, thanks for weighing in with your own experiences, and saving me a 'oh, for fuck's sake' post. There was a wonderful "The Story" on public radio last week with a gay couple, both HIV+, who've been living with the diagnosis for decades. None of their friends from that time are around any more; they spent a good chunk of their lives expecting to die. How do you measure that experience? I don't think you can. I don't think there's any point in it.
(For those who are interested, I can't get the page to load, but the show's website is the story.org.)
"It was an interesting time to be poor, gay, and too smart for your own damn good."
Still is.
I'm doing my dissertation on news media and same-sex marriage, particularly representations of the couples*. You know why so many people think that this is an issue primarily affecting better off white people? Because those are pretty much the only people who show up in the media.
Here in MA, gay men in couples tend to earn a significantly lower income than their married heterosexual counterparts. Lesbians earn a bit more than their married heterosexual counterparts. (I attribute this to structures of gender--the ways that married women are more likely to work part-time and/or take time out of wage labor markets for childbearing/rearing. Lesbians don't have those higher male incomes to draw upon.) In same-sex household raising children, Massachusetts is a bit different than the rest of the country in that those couples have household incomes that are about the same as those of heterosexual married households (nationally, same-sex couples with children tend to make less than different-sex couples). Generally, taking households with and without children same-sex couples tend to have slightly higher incomes than different-sex households (again, I'm placing this one in gender/wage-labor markets/and the mommy track type stuff).
However, when we look at the couples who show up in the media, they're better off than the population at large, and than the rest of lesbian and gay population (no transgender folks show up, or at least they aren't noted as such, and neither are any bisexuals). The couples we see are more likely to own homes (while same-sex couples are actually less likely to own homes), and the homes we see tend to be more extravagant. There's a complex thing going on here, between movement activity and news reporting, but the public face of the movement is almost exclusively white. And wealthy.
As someone who can't even afford to go to the dentist, I don't give two shits about a couple of brides' matching Armani pant suits. As someone engaged in a national job hunt, non-discrimination protection is far more important to me than marriage.
But incorporating same-sex couples into the wedding-industrial complex is apparently more important than issues affecting poorer LGBT people, who don't matter, to media or movement.
*(my work is dealing specifically with Boston's Globe and Herald--the income data and such come from the Census and the Williams Institute at UCLA).
"The president's black, my Lambo's blue, and I'll be God-damned if my rims ain't too.."
I think that's the final word on the subject.
kidding... I mean he's black as it's usually meant in America, and is a part of that community, but he's also somewhat unique as a black man - and not just because he's president (!!) or has more white blood than most of the other black Americans, and not really because of his success and certainly not fot his intelligence, but because of a whole host of things, such as his upbringing in disparate locations and the fact that he's related to every single United Color of Benetton. Hell he's probably related to me in some distant way. Anyway Obama's black, whatever.
(I know this comment was way up there but I just wanted to respond to it)
@ MAC:
Of course it'd be better if people were free to express themselves. What I was really try to get at with the hypothetical co-eds was not the idea that the girl might mislead the boy by throwing out a label that clearly didn't fit (for whatever reason). I meant that when we use labels that are in common usage with an agreed upon meaning such as "straight" or "gay", we should only employ them using their agreed upon meaning or add a qualifier or else the shorthand becomes useless. For me this whole thing is more an issue of clear communication.
Just to join in piling on Nathan: I'm bi, have never once slept with someone I picked up in a bar, and have been faithfully married for nearly 21 years.
On the other hand, unlike the commenter quoted in the post, I never did go for the independent bisexual social/political identity thing. It's not a bad idea in principle, but back when I was single, the only bi group I knew about was a) bus rides away, and b) rumored to be very poly oriented, while I was only interested in monogamy. So I figured I could fit in the straight world or fit in the gay and lesbian world, but didn't have a practically viable third alternative.
Well, yes, white queers do have privilege. Just as black hets have privilege: heterosexual privilege. While I agree that comparing oppressions and privileges for competitive purposes yields little, I think it's important to acknowledge that there are a variety of ways to be both privileged and oppressed. Analyzing the similarities and differences among forms of privilege and oppression can be illustrative not only of the nature of privilege and oppression generally, but also of the specific experiences of various groups living some kind of "minority" experience. And the complicating fact is that many people are both privileged and oppressed over the course of their lives, and sometimes in the same moment.
It's probably also helpful to really understand what the oppression of gay people is. It's true that, in the main, it has not taken the forms that the oppression of black people in this country has taken. If you look for images of gay people being sprayed with fire hoses or "straight only" water fountains, they will be hard to find, no doubt about it.
To me, it seems that there is the black civil rights movement as it actually was, and The Black Civil Rights Movement as an iconic historic event. The latter gets in the way in every way in this dicussion: (white) gay people tend to want to lay claim to the iconic movement, often with little (or only superficial) regard for the lived experience of the actual historic events as they happened to real people.
But I also think that black (straight) people tend to view oppression only through the lens of the iconic movement, discounting other forms of oppression to the extent that they don't look like the iconic civil rights movement.
So, for example, I think it's in poor taste -- to say the least -- for fellow white gay men to speak of being "free at last," as I have heard them do. I know where they're coming from, and there is a very real sense in which gay people (even gay white men) have not been free in this country, even today. But we haven't yet reached the moment (and maybe never will or even should) where that rhetoric can be lifted from its historical context. In context, it is not responsive to the experience gay white men as white men.
But I'm similarly tired of being told that the closet is somehow a "perk" of being gay -- that the invisibility that gay people endure, which is enforced by the omnipresent threat of all forms of violence, is somehow a blessing. It isn't.
Anyway, I had a conclusion, but I can't quite remember it and I think I've gone on long enough. You get the point, I think.
Have you ever noticed that marginalized groups can talk for hours about their own societal issues but couldn't care less about the (very similar) problems of other marginalized groups?
I think we'd all be better off if we shut up about our own problems and worked towards alleviating someone else's issues. Isn't that how relationships work? The reciprocity comes when both partners are solely focused on lifting the other up.
Not to discount education, advocacy etc. for your own group. But just something to think about...
"Now, black folks need to be humble here, instead of proprietary, and here is why--we do the same damn thing. Think about the ancient tradition of the black clergy identifying themselves as the America's Hebrews, of thinking of MLK as a sort of Moses, and his allusions to the Promised Land. Think about the Black Israelites. More disturbing, I can't tell you how many rallies I went to at Howard designed to memorialize the "Black Holocaust." Which was fine up to this point--unlike folks in the gay community, I saw several speakers at those rallies claim that the "Black Holocaust" was ten times worse, and thus deserved more attention.
Now, there are reasons why that happened, but the fact of the matter is that it was ugly. We need to guard against our sense of virtue, against our own self-righteousness."
OOOooweee! Thats good stuff right there.
Unfortunately, humans collectively are not by nature rigorously self-reflective. If we were, Socrates would not have been poisoned, and Sufis would not have been executed in the medieval Islamic world, and Malcolm would not have been gunned down--all for pushing for unyielding truth over dogma.
But still we rise, and still we rise.
Hating on bisexuals has thankfully leached out of lesbian culture, or at least lesbian culture as I know it. Most of my gay female friends have also dated guys, so bisexuality is unremarkable to me and most other mid-20-something lesbians I know. It's one of the benefits of gay culture becoming more mainstream, i.e. we don't feel like an embattled minority that needs to police its borders in order to maintain group identity.
ECL is spot-on with her point about why gays were cheesed off at black people after Prop 8, and offers the best analysis of gay use of civil rights analogies that I've read. So the civil rights movement isn't a good analogy for gay marriage rights. Now we know! In this light it's been frustrating to watch the discussion about what went wrong with No on 8 devolve into an idiotic and ineffectual blacks vs. gays fray. The important lesson Prop 8 gave to the gay rights community is that it needs to get better at reaching out to the black community.
A la MAJeff's point, it's probably good for fundraising for the gay rights industrial complex to use wealthy white couples as shining examples of gay married virtue - this causes rich white gays to open their wallets and makes mainstream white people more comfortable with the idea. But if Prop 8 is any indication this small-tent approach is no longer useful.
God, I'm an idiot. I'm gay, almost forty, and I like to think I've considered these issues. I've never understood biphobia. But this is the first time I've realized that, for some people, sexual orientation is just as much about who you don't sleep with as who you do.
MaJeff, I like your commentary, and if you think employment nondiscrimination is more important than marriage, that's a-ok by me. But I take issue with the "rich white Armani brides for marriage" vs. "normal suffering LGBT people for jobs" framing. Marriage and civil union rights affect poor people, too -- unless you think there are no poor LGBT families, or that legal protections don't matter to them. The legal protections of marriage are probably more important for lower-income people who can't afford second-parent adoption and all the costs of creating contractual substitutes for marriage--costs that wealthier Armani-wearing gays can far more easily absorb.
As you yourself note, of course, those lower-income families aren't who shows up on tv. Of course many lower-income LGBT's are going to care about ENDA, too -- maybe more than marriage, maybe not.
Personally I am 100% in favor of ENDA, but I also think it's naive to think that legal job protections are going to work as a magic bullet without a social change where LGBT's are not viewed as second class. It's not like many employers can't think of a decent excuse to not hire the gay guy, if they want to, anyway, and our employment nondiscrimination laws generally don't do a great job of rooting out pretextual firings.
In short, I think your Armani bride diss is more than a little shortsighted. I just don't get the need for so many gay people to pooh pooh the marriage equality fight. Personally, I don't see any need to choose between working on these two things, anyway, and work on one issue helps clear the way on the others, generally. It all goes back to the same damn thing, discrimination.
From a white, or I don't know, non-black perspective, and I think it's always important to recognize either-or fallacies, like all fallacies, break down the discussion, I see Martin Luther King, Jr. as someone who was not only specific to African Americans, but someone who comes out of a world tradition, like Ghandi before him and Ceasar Chavez after, just as I see the Filipino writer Carlos Bulosan's generation representational autobiography, America is in the Heart, part of a thread in American literature that the Autobiography of Malcolm X is most famous for (though of course King knew about Ghandi, while it's questionable whether Malcolm X ever read Bulosan, whose blistering critique of racism in America with its special exclusion of Filipinos in mixed race fraternization, let alone marriage, was part of the critique). The civil rights movement lead by King is one of America's great contributions to the world, right in the tradition of the American Revolution itself. People worldwide seeking justice and freedom have been inspired and moved by it, so it should not surprise blacks that others appropriate its glories and virtues. That said, there is something presumptuous, not to mention foolish, about thinking that just because another group has suffered prejudice and injustice that they are necessarily in synch with your experience or that any group of people all thinks the same way about anything, let alone a world wide controversy--see news from Senegal today, for example.
It would probably be salutary to consider Richard Wright and James Baldwin in thinking these issues out.
However, insofar as marriage is concerned, as a confirmed heterosexual who has lived through a failed marriage and seen as many if not more failed heterosexual marriages as successes and witnessing my children's generation that distrusts marriage to the nth degree, I really wish those who are so concerned about the sanctity of male-female marriage would begin to consider why the institution is in such sorry shape these days, rather than sticking their nose in other people's sacred relations.
"Nate's point was mired in useless stereotype, but I understand what he was saying. While there are definitely parallels, the struggle is not the same because white queers have the advantage of privilege on their side."
But some black people have had, and continue to have, privilege on their side too, no? Barack Obama; he's got a lot more money and power than a lot of queer people. Roland Burris; he's got more privilege than some working-class closeted lesbian, doesn't he? And...there are a lot of black queer people, too.
The discrimination and oppression suffered by black people (as blacks( and gay people (as gay) are very different. But as several commenters have pointed out, discussing them in terms of who is less or more oppressed isn't necessarily all that helpful or insightful.
And, more importantly than my natterings: every time this discussion comes up, somebody should quote Mildred Loving. So I'm going to:
"My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right. The majority believed that what the judge said, that it was God’s plan to keep people apart, and that government should discriminate against people in love. But I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generation’s fears and prejudices have given way, and today’s young people realize that if someone loves someone they have a right to marry.
Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the “wrong kind of person” for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.
I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about."
Amen.
black people get assumed by white people to be the arbiters of whether something's authentically part of the King legacy
There is a powerful leverage to be gained, by anyone who wants to fight for freedom and equality, from simply acknowledging this habit and growing past it.
It's not the mission of every, or any, brown skinned person in this country to validate my struggle.
I know I'm right. I don't need my real or virtual Official Black Friends to affirm me in order to claim my role in the ongoing American drama of expanding freedom to enclose everybody.
And that's one of the ways I'm a strange white skinned person. I do my best to preach to my people about developing ourselves past the reflexive desire for positive reinforcement from people of color, but I can't do it alone.
It's not that I don't want the support of Oakland's church ladies for marriage equality. It's just that I don't need them there to make my goal a just one. (They should be there for the 55,000 black children in CA with same-sex parents. Those kids have a claim on their grandmas' support and my job as the experienced organizer is to help them press that claim. Not to get permission to assert that mine is a movement for civil rights.)
TNC, I appreciate your comment above (yeah, I'm late answering your question). You say, "I can't figure out, for the life of me, why this keeps coming up" -- that is, whether Obama is black.
I think the reason it does is the next comment. BabylonSista says, "Hang the hell on, Dan. Obama is black," and then says I'm being unfair because I'm "trying to negate the identity of a biracial person."
You see what the problem is? It looks to me like the fact that Obama is "biracial" is negated by being called black (and not by me). We are accustomed to this because in America you have two choices, you are white or you are black. (Latino? Okay, you're kinda black. Asian? Shit, I don't even need to say).
If he identifies as black, fine, I am not trying to take that from him. But there is a problem here. Obama's first book is all about it -- contending with what and who he is. Obama may have resolved these issues, but for the many, many people who are multiracial and/or multiethnic, I think there is an agenda at work and I think that agenda is forcing most of them to choose sides (and excluding entirely Latinos and Asians). It's the racial draft all over again. Tiger is white. Obama is black, and for at least two reasons, first, because he says so, and second, because we really, really want a black president. (It's not enough, by the way, that he says so, because the rest of us have to believe it. I'm sure Condi has said she's black, and so what?)
I want a black president too. I have read your comments on Michelle, the White House, the photo spread in that French magazine; I saw Colin Powell crying about the election on CNN; I watched Rev. Lowery on youtube a bunch of times. I'm moved, and we have a really opportunity here.
But this is also a time to ask the question, why do we still apply the one-drop rule? We have an opportunity here to come up with a new language, a new way for people to "identify" when they aren't "pure" -- when their family wasn't the whitest of white protestants coming over on the mayflower, or isn't Southside of Chicago black.
dan,
check out the article: Identity, Race, Racism, Labels and Shortcuts: Hopefully Not a Remake of the Same Song, But a Somewhat Familiar, Yet Still Engaging, New Tune
on www.thetalentedmasses.com.
I'm interested in your thoughts.
"Tiger is white." dan
TR: I know very few people who consider Tiger Woods, if that's who you mean, as white.
In the token reactionary McCainiac so don't take my opinion too serious, but I've always figured Tiger Woods is essentially what he says he is. That being a mixture of Asian, Black, and White with maybe some American Indian somewhere.
I see the concern, but I'm not sure Obama has to mean that biracial people must choose to be black. That decathlete at the Olympics, Bryan Clay, is half-black and half-Japanese. So far as I know he is considered Afro-Asian or Afro-Japanese and I don't recall there being any problem with that. Lenny Kravitz is black and Jewish and I believe claims both.
As defined by many above, I come from the ultimate in privilege, white, male, straight, upper middle class, conservative, college educated etc, so of course I don't fully understand all the issues. I do have to say I find this thread fascinating and I think that the confines of a blog like this is the perfect place to hash things like this out. I love hearing all points of view and love to over think things.
However, as an outsider to much of this, I really wonder if bringing a lot of the talk about privilege and whose trumps someone else's takes the eyes off the prize. I have always been fond of the "walk and chew gum" concept Ta has been bringing up, but in the aftermath of this vote, there is way too much finger pointing. Having Dan Savage lecture black people about homophobia is about as effective as having Al Sharpton lecture certain people in my neighborhood about race relations. It just isn't going to work and is only going to harden people.
Most people in my family are conservative, but they are not very religious. They are small government types so many are persuadible on an issue like gay marriage. However lecture them about how privileged they are, bitch about how the Catholic Church is full of bigots, and then vandalize churches, then they will probably shut down the whole conversation.
Have you ever noticed that marginalized groups can talk for hours about their own societal issues but couldn't care less about the (very similar) problems of other marginalized groups?
Yes. And it's exactly what keeps the political and economic power structure in this country overwhelmingly white, male and straight. Keep on arguing, guys....
Solon gave men the right to vote.. women refer to men in order to get to vote.. men are upset. blacks refer to whites and jews.. gays refer to blacks... bis refer to gays...
those who are not oppressed anymore, especially the 2nd generation, should (be able to) stay cool when those who still feel oppressed refer to past struggles? for sure, those who claim to want the same as has gone before are not belittling those events. quite the contrary - they are the only ones who keep reminding young generations of past struggles and their relevance today?
Evans:
Very interesting. I think the Racial Draft is a great way to illustrate the group forces at work here (when I said "agenda" above that's what I was getting at). I went back to the two articles you cited -- "He's Not Black" by Marie Arana, a Latina and "He's Black, Get Over It" by a multiracial man self-identified as black, by Adam Serwer.
The question is, why is the Racial Draft skit funny? Its funny because Serwer is wrong when he argues that "The black community in America has always accepted people of varying shades, cultures and backgrounds." In fact, this is demonstrably false, and there are a host of people who have a question mark over their heads because black people have not fully embraced them as black (OJ, Condi, Tiger, maybe Lenny Kravitz). The Draft works because we all know this, and want to see how it turns out.
What is interesting about the Draft is that it is really about allocating blackness, which, to bring it back to this thread, has a special cultural and political credibility that lots of people would like to have access to (which is why gays were outraged at their apparent abandonment by blacks on Prop 8).
So the Jews get Lenny, and the Asians get Wu Tang. The whites wouldn't want someone "really" black, so they get Colin Powell. (Note: I'm not question his identity, but the skit, and many others, are).
The Latino case is the interesting one: it was totally unfunny, and it was because the Elian Gonzalez thing just didn't work within the framework of the skit. It was kinda dumb, and I think that's because Chappelle couldn't come up with a good case of someone on the line between latin and black, over whose idenitity there is some amount of controversy. Notice also how the other "teams" in the draft fit in the white black divide, so we know what to laugh about. Asians and Jews are white, its funny who is now on their team. Whites are white, and its funny/controversial that Powell is on theirs. Latinos don't fit into this.
Which brings us back to Arana and your article. I'm not sure sure was trying to draft Obama into the "multiracial" category, or that she viewed that category as superior to black. I think she's saying that "black" doesn't capture all of Obama's identity, and that we need a new language. (It is instructive that the source of this viewpoint is Latino, though of course also a source of controversy).
Now, Obama identifies as black, and on the one hand that should be enough. But I think your article illustrates the forces that force him to make that choice -- he cannot be multiracial, he has to be black or white.
Why? Well, here's Serwer: "Tiger Woods' insistence on identifying himself as "cablinasian" was met with such hostility because of the extra distance he seemed to be drawing between himself and other black folks." I just don't think so, and I don't think Woods would have a problem being listed in the company of indisputably black people like Michael Jordan or Donovan McNabb. He wasn't distancing himself from black people, he was saying I'm other things too, and -- even though someone like Serwer wants him to be one or the other -- he wasn't going allow himself to be drafted.
thanks dan
Serwer is wrong when he argues that "The black community in America has always accepted people of varying shades, cultures and backgrounds." In fact, this is demonstrably false, and there are a host of people who have a question mark over their heads because black people have not fully embraced them as black (OJ, Condi, Tiger, maybe Lenny Kravitz).
Dan, I disagree with you here. I say this as an Ivy-League educated black woman with light skin, blond hair and green eyes (two black parents and a host of recessive genes made me! lol). I've had my share of folks who've questioned my African-American bona fides because of the reasons I've just named. However, more than 95% of the black folks I've ever met in my life have accepted me immediately as black. (They always know, too. It's only non-blacks who ask me, "What are you?"). And I would guess that Serwer, as a biracial man, is speaking from experience, also, of being and feeling accepted in the black community.
The folks you mention with the question mark? In my experience, the question mark appears when the person seems to be distancing themselves from the black community, not the other way around. For example, to my knowledge, Condi Rice has never done that, so while folks may disagree with her politics, I've personally never heard anyone question her blackness. And OJ? What you see (IMO) is mostly disgust at what he's become--a desire to disown him if we could. But even that desire means we know he started out as family. Tiger? I've heard mostly older generation folks criticize him for "thinking he's too good to be black." That's a desire to keep him in the family, not to push him away. But there is still a lot of pride in his accomplishments across the board, and among the younger generation, an acceptance of him the way he defines himself.
This, however, I do agree with: He wasn't distancing himself from black people, he was saying I'm other things too, and -- even though someone like Serwer wants him to be one or the other -- he wasn't going allow himself to be drafted. I do think we need to make room for people to identify themselves as they wish and be fully who they are.
I agree more with Greg Rodriquez's take as to why the GLBT community and many on the left felt the need to single and put a beat down on blacks voters in Cali.
The ugly side of beyond race
Anyway, I have no problem with the GLBT community admiring civil rights leaders and the civil rights movement but I do have a problem when I see people frame the movement as one-dimensional and flattening out the desires, words and actions of the leaders and people involved. I am not saying that this is what the GLBT community is doing, I am referring to something that has unfortunately happened across the board in all sectors of American society from education to politics. Its not about "self-righteousness" its about the fact that the black liberation movements have lost almost all of its substance and the civil rights movement and Dr. King in particular have been used by every possible group for their own self-interest while the bulk of what he said, stood for and fought for is ignored. This is the sensitivity. This is what gets me and some others annoyed.
Also, the last aspect of what you said gets sticky. I agreed with you then I read it and disagreed and agreed and did not know what to make out of it. Here is why:
1. Moses, Promised Land etc... are biblical. Most of that rhetoric is preached in churches because they are really using biblical scripture as a source of liberation, hope and uplift. A central pillar of the black church before being hijacked by prosperity pimps and opportunists was and in some churches still is liberation. Its more about Christianity and the use of biblical scripture and not the appropriation of any one group's movement.
2. There are black Jews and also there are many scholars who say that many of the people spoken about in the Bible may have been black. I have a friend who speaks about this a lot so there is a lot more nuance.
3. This is where I agreed and this is where I believe you made your strongest point, talk of a "Black Holocaust", yea and also, the extended talk of none biblical related transgressions towards Jews that some black ministers and leaders discuss and correlate to black American suffering can be seen as hypocrisy when they are against the equal rights of another group and are offended by another group who may just find inspiration in black movements. I think that you should take what you wrote to the closest traditional black church.
On Purity...
" a new way for people to "identify" when they aren't "pure" -- when their family wasn't the whitest of white protestants coming over on the mayflower, or isn't Southside of Chicago black" --Dan
African Americans (even on the South Side of Chicago) aren't *PURE*. Hardly any African Americans have exclusively African ancestors. African Americans are already a mixed race.
The one drop rule was implemented to prevent mixed race African Americans from being White, and claiming the benefits and privileges as such.
The one drop rule is not absurd just as it applies to Obama, but as it applies to most African Americans. Don't let my brown skin and kinky dreads fool you, if the One Drop rule worked to define who is white the way it defines who is black, I would have to add up my white ancestors and say that I am only passing for black. Very many of us would be.
Re: Here in MA, gay men in couples tend to earn a significantly lower income than their married heterosexual counterparts.
Interesting. Is this due to the fact that there are a lot of gay male couples where the partners earn very different amounts of money from each other? So I've observed at least (and my own relationship is somewhat along those lines; my income is about twice my partner's). Along heterosexual people the trend is increasingly toward same-class couplings where both husband and wife have similar educations and similar earnings (though the wife of course will usually be the one who takes the income hit for child-bearing and rearing). Among gays this trend is far less in evidence, perhaps because we form a fairly small fraction of the population and we can't afford to be picky about where someone works or went to school when we are husband-hunting.