Black Like Us

by Devon Carbado

  “Right on, Paulene,” J. responded, sealing the pact.

  N. knocked hard.

  “Who’s there?” a voice from within called with an assertive tremor. “Your granddaughter, Nannie.”

  The door opened slowly to a forty-five degree angle.

  “The leaves told me my people was comin,” a tall, cordovan colored-woman of about eighty smiled as she slid a shotgun back into its place beside the door.

  1980–2000

  COMING OUT BLACK, LIKE US

  “Now I speak and my burden is lightened…”

  WRITING IN 1983, AUDRE LORDE, LIKE MANY AFRICAN AMERICAN lesbian, gay, and bisexual people who had come of age during the civil rights era, understood the limitations of liberation movements fraught with divisiveness. “[I]f there is one thing we can learn from the 60s it is how infinitely complex any move for liberation must be. For we must move against not only those forces which dehumanize us from outside, but also against those oppressive values which we have been forced to take into ourselves.”1 In spite of the political strides of the African American civil rights struggle of the 1960s and the gay rights movement of the 1970s, black lesbians and gay men faced an unfinished agenda in the 1980s—an agenda that challenged the ways in which Americans viewed black homosexuality as much as it revealed the ways in which black homosexuals viewed themselves and each other.

  African Americans had employment and educational opportunities that were unencumbered by institutionalized segregation. While racial disparities persisted, and while the struggle for equality was far from over, blacks no longer were mandated to the lowest social caste. Race pride had trumped old stereotypes with empowering slogans such as the 1960s’ “Black is beautiful.” These strides had a cost, however.

  The African American community was increasingly divided by income, leading to a renewed criminalization of the black underclass—sometimes with the complicity of other African Americans. With the rise of middle-income blacks also came calls for dismantling affirmative action programs, which, critics argued, were now unnecessary. Complicating matters further was the opinion held by some African Americans that advances among black women, as well as black gay men and lesbians, in the areas of jobs and social status threatened the stability of the black family.

  A similar dynamic occurred among lesbians and gay men, with no less troubling consequences. Homosexuals were “coming out” in unprecedented numbers, discovering their political clout as an identifiably gay community. Openly homosexual candidates were being elected to political office, while lesbians and gay men—including black lesbians and gays—stepped forward in journalism, professional sports, music and the arts, and the armed forces to challenge debilitating sexual stereotypes. For the first time ever, the burgeoning gay rights movement had become a formidable force against antigay prejudice as well as a source of inspiration for lesbians and gay men everywhere. But as with African Americans, social progress had its drawbacks. Whereas pre-Stonewall homosexuals were persecuted by virtue of their “invisibility,” out gays of the post-Stonewall era were met by a relentless homophobic backlash. Cultural watchdogs on the right moved forward with antigay initiatives intended to curtail lesbian and gay civil rights, if not drive homosexuals back into the closet.

  The enlarged presence of gay people in everyday life also brought the unavoidable issue of sex to the forefront of political and cultural debates. Gay men’s sexuality was thrust into news headlines with the first reports of AIDS in 1981. Surfacing as a mysterious illness among gay men, AIDS was first dubbed “gay cancer” but was soon renamed Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), when medical professionals realized that heterosexuals were vulnerable, too. Consequently, gay activists were the first to attempt to get the public, the government, and the gay community itself to take the sudden crisis seriously. Larry Kramer voiced alarm in “1,112 and Counting,” an essay published in the gay press in 1983. “If this article does not scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble,” he wrote. “If this article does not arouse anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men have no future on this Earth. Our continued existence depends on how angry you can get.” 2 When Kramer wrote the piece, 1,112 AIDS cases had been reported, up alarmingly from only 41 cases cited in the New York Times the previous year. By the end of 1985, however, the number had exploded to 11,980, while reported AIDS-related deaths rose from 641 in 1982 to 6,973 in 1984. These numbers impressed on Kramer the conviction that “In all the history of homosexuality we have never before been so close to death and extinction.” Because early warnings from gay pundits like Kramer were directed at the predominantly white gay male population that was perceived to be most at risk, at first activists failed to consider, let alone address, race concerns in AIDS organizing. By 1987, African Americans and Latinos represented more than forty percent of AIDS cases, even though they accounted for only about twenty percent of the U.S. population. Among women, the racial numbers were even more stark. In 1988, black women and Latinas made up more than seventy percent of all women with AIDS, with black women alone accounting for forty-nine percent of the total. Meanwhile, of children with AIDS, fifty-seven percent were black, twenty-three percent Hispanic. Despite the highly disproportionate impact of AIDS on minority communities, AIDS education and prevention funding nevertheless flowed to groups serving gay white males.

  Within the African American community, civil rights leaders contributed to the shortfall of services by maintaining that AIDS was not a black civil rights issue. As Cathy Cohen explained in The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (1999), a number of factors contributed to this misimpression. African Americans feared that engaging in AIDS activism, for example through programs of needle exchange and sex education, would confirm the historical (mis)association of black people with drug use and sexual deviance (specifically, homosexuality and sexually transmitted diseases). According to Cohen, the initial response to AIDS by national black political organizations such as the NAACP, the Urban League, and the SCLC was one of denial. In fact, NAACP literature failed to mention AIDS until 1989, by which point more than 17,000 African Americans had died from the disease.3 Complicating matters was the problem of black establishment organizations’ singling out women and children as “innocent victims.” The exclusion of gay men, drug users, and sex workers from the debate led such groups as the Minority AIDS Project, Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD), AMASSI, and the National Task Force on

  AIDS Prevention (NTFAP), the first federally funded AIDS service organization focusing on black men who have sex with men, to challenge the legitimacy of black leadership as the AIDS crisis worsened throughout the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, today most black civil rights organizations have learned to respond to AIDS as a civil rights issue. Indeed, NAACP President and CEO Kweisi Mfume was named the 2002 spokesperson for National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. Inaugurated a year earlier, the day constitutes a nationwide, black community effort to draw attention to and educate people about the impact of AIDS on African Americans.

  The black community’s troubling response to AIDS has been strained further by some African Americans’ reducing homosexuality to a white cultural phenomenon. This misconception has shaped the conservative sexual politics behind much black antiracist discourse. Molefi Asante’s Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (1980), for instance, asserted that homosexuality is not an “Afrocentric relationship.” Nathan Hare and Julia Hare’s The Endangered Black Family: Coping with Unisexualization and the Coming Extinction of the Black Race (1984) elaborated on this idea, claiming that there is “no need to engage in endless debates about the pros and cons of homosexuality…. [It] does not promote black family stability and…it historically has been a product largely of Europeanized society.”4 Dr. Frances Cress Wesling, writing in The Isis Papers: Keys to the Colors (1990), weighed in with an observation worthy of Anita Bryant: “Black psychiatrists must understand that whites may condone homosexuality for themselves, but we as Blacks must see i
t as a strategy for destroying Black people that must be countered.”5 As black gay filmmaker Marlon Riggs rightly pointed out, this self-serving rehistorization advocates a mythologized past, wherein “African men were strong, noble protectors, providers, and warriors for their families and tribes.” Central to this myth is the idea that “In pre-colonial Africa, men were truly men. And women were women. Nobody was lesbian. Nobody was feminist. Nobody was gay.”6

  In spite of its divisiveness, black sexual conservatism served as the cornerstone for “community-building” in the Million Man March on Washington, D.C. Organized by the Nation of Islam in 1993, the purpose of the gathering was to “build and sustain a free and empowered [black] community, a just society and a better world.”7 While the mission statement for the march did not openly condemn homosexuality, it encouraged male/female relationships, promoted patriarchal values, and was buttressed by a fundamentalist religious platform. Moreover, Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan had publicly denounced homosexuality on numerous occasions, positing that lesbianism is a disease produced by what he perceived to be a particular black familial dysfunction: single female-headed households. Nevertheless, some black gay men, like Dennis Holmes, president of the National Black Lesbian and Gay Leadership Forum, joined the march “to demonstrate that we are members of the black family.”8 Keith Boykin, former executive director of the Forum, participated for similar reasons. Other black gay men, however, together with many black feminists, refused to be involved, reasoning that marching would be tantamount to supporting the homophobic and sexist ideology around which the march was organized.

  The black left has also had its share of problems with homophobia. When organizers of a ceremonial demonstration to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech announced that homosexuals would not be permitted to address the audience, the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays (NCBLG) stepped in to protest the exclusion. The NCBLG (renamed the National Black Lesbian and Gay Leadership Forum in 1988) lobbied the march coordinator, Congressman Walter Fauntleroy, until Audre Lorde was added to the program. The NCBLG also met with Coretta Scott King, who subsequently called for lesbian and gay civil rights legislation. By the time of the 1987 Gay and Lesbian March on Washington, D.C., the situation had hardly improved: With the notable exception of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, no African American establishment civil rights group participated. By 1993, however, the relationship between African Americans and gay people was reconciled to the extent that the NAACP unanimously endorsed that year’s Gay and Lesbian March on the nation’s capital.

  In matters of race representation within the white lesbian and gay rights movement, the situation was no better. The debate on gays in the military is one instructive example. In 1993, President Bill Clinton outlawed homosexuals from military service with the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. When gay personnel began to be discharged under the new policy, gay rights groups fought the ban by selecting test litigants, individuals whose distinguished record of service flew in the face of arguments that lesbians and gays threatened the purported goal of “military cohesion.” Remarkably, all the high-profile plaintiffs— Margarethe Cammemeyer, Keith Meinhold, and Joseph Steffan among them—were white. This racial specificity belies the fact that an African American gay man first beat the military’s prohibition on homosexuals. Perry Watkins, an Army sergeant known as “the Rosa Parks of gay soldiers,” was drafted into the Vietnam War at age nineteen. From his induction in 1967, Watkins repeatedly acknowledged his sexual orientation to commanding officers. He even performed lavish, military drag shows replete with a signature seven-foot feather boa. When fellow soldiers attempted to gang rape him in a gay-bashing incident, the army began an investigation that led to Watkin’s dismissal. After a ten-year legal battle, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit concluded that the army not only knew Watkins was gay but had allowed him to reenlist three times. Rather than return to the military at the court’s behest, however, he opted to take an honorable discharge, $135,000 in back pay, and full retirement benefits.

  For the most part, Watkins’ story was ignored by gay organizers as the campaign for gays in the military took off. According to Tom Stoddard, a white gay lawyer who directed the Campaign for Military Service, “[T]here was a public relations problem with Perry.”9 Ostensibly, the problem was not simply that Watkins was black, but also that he wore a nose-ring. Speaking to the movement’s decision to champion the newly “out” Cammemeyer over himself, Watkins nevertheless indicated that race was the determinant. “[W]e’ go with a [white] woman who lied for twenty years before we go with a black man who had to live the struggle nearly every day of his life.”10 Furthermore, while African American women were discharged from the military for homosexuality at twice the rate of white men, neither the mainstream press nor gay rights proponents have presented black women as victims of discrimination, let alone as icons. Indeed, the dismissal of navy personnel Wendi Williams and Alicia Harris in 1980 received even less attention than Watkins’s case.

  As the gay movement battled the military ban, a right-wing group called Colorado for Family Values put on the ballot a proposed amendment to the state constitution. Amendment 2 sought to repeal existing gay civil rights laws and prevent Colorado from enacting any such laws in the future. This ballot initiative was part of a larger New Rights Initiative, which redefined gay rights as “special rights” (paralleling the claim that race-based civil rights measures such as affirmative action were a form of special rights for blacks and other nonwhites). Gay civil rights groups filed suit, taking their case all the way to the Supreme Court. Its 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, a landmark case involving Michael Hardwick, who was arrested for having sex with another man in his own bedroom, had upheld the constitutional legality of a Georgia sodomy statute, and, by extension, the right of any state to outlaw sex between consenting adults. In the instance of Amendment 2—and much to the surprise of many activists who anticipated a return to Bowers—the Court invalidated the amendment. Writing for the majority of the Court in Romer v. Evans, Justice Kennedy maintained that “We must conclude that Amendment 2 classifies homosexuals not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else…. This Colorado cannot do. A State cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its law.”11

  In an effort to combat right-wing offenses against sexual minorities, lesbian and gay activists had throughout the 1980s begun to reorganize old political organizations and to establish new ones, the better to answer political repression against an increasingly visible lesbian and gay population. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) marked a historic transition in the movement by becoming the first professional lesbian and gay political organization with a national agenda. By the 1990s, however, it enlarged its platform under the leadership of Urvashi Vaid to include so-called nongay matters like abortion rights and opposition to the Persian Gulf War. The broadening of NGLTF’s agenda caused controversy within the organization, leading critics to insist that a fundamentally gay-oriented organization ought to remain devoted to gay-centered politics. Along with NGLTF, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a Washington, D.C.–based congressional lobbying organization formed in 1980, signaled the movement’s new influence in shaping legislation at the national level.

  While the Human Rights Campaign began a lobbying campaign in the halls of Congress, in New York City the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) took to the streets to protest a lack of effective public policy in the AIDS crisis. Organized in 1987 by Larry Kramer and some three hundred New York activists, ACT UP adopted the motto “United in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.” The group raised public awareness about AIDS/HIV more dramatically than any other organization, expanding access to clinical trials of drugs’ efficacy, pushing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to expedite its drug approval process, and lowering the cost of medication. The confrontational str
eet tactics of ACT UP inspired the formation in 1990 of Queer Nation, a militant “in-your-face” organization that embraced anti­assimilationism with the slogan “We’re here, we’re Queer, get used to it,” as well as the Lesbian Avengers, a radical direct action group that gave voice to “lesbian survival and visibility.”

  Given the leadership role of gay men in responding to the AIDS crisis, AIDS activism is traditionally discussed in the context of the gay rights struggle. However, the women’s health movement also had a defining, if seldom acknowledged, impact on AIDS activism. Throughout the 1970s, feminists challenged the oppressive health care system by taking matters into their own hands. Women’s centers, support groups, and clinics advocated for a feminist approach to women’s health issues. The Boston Women’s Health Collective revolutionized women’s health in 1976 with the publication of Our Bodies, Ourselves, a groundbreaking book that not only provided basic medical information from a woman’s point of view but also affirmed lesbianism and discussed taboo topics like rape, incest, and abortion. The reproductive rights movement similarly established a formidable activist model. Although women had for years campaigned for the right to legal abortion, national pro-choice groups were formed in the 1960s, with both the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws joining the cause in 1969. When the Supreme Court invalidated anti-abortion laws throughout the United States in 1973 with the Roe v. Wade decision, pro-choice activists began providing abortion and contraception services, advocating federal funding of family planning, and fighting the political backlash from right-wing legislators who sought to overturn the ruling.

  Despite its success, the reproductive rights movement did not consider the impact of race and class on reproductive freedom. Black feminists challenged this failing by insisting that the feminist reproductive rights campaign address issues like welfare and sterilization abuse. Black feminists argued that a connection could be drawn between media images of black women as welfare queens and the “common sense” notion that black women could be—quite literally—“fixed.” A new medical device called Norplant allowed for up to five years of birth control in one dose, providing lawmakers with the means to impose short-term sterility on black women who were perceived to be unfit mothers. Although women-of-color organizations, such as the National Black Women’s Health Project, challenged the regulatory efforts involving Norplant, the idea of black population control had taken hold.