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It has to begin with youth.
We cannot possibly hope to win over a majority of those in the elder generations who have been raised from their earliest years believing that to be gay is to commit an unspeakably disgusting sin, something that is not "innately black." There will always be outliers in those communities - people such as my maternal grandmother - who defy what the statistics would predict and reject the notion of inequality in the 21st Century.
But for the most part, let's be realistic - those generations are out of reach. It would be a waste of time to expend a huge amount of energy and money trying to win them over.
For young African Americans, it is different. Not only can we win them over, we must. If homophobia is allowed to calcify amongst the African Americans of under 30 years old today, the movement for LGBT equality will continuously run into massive roadblocks in an America that will only become increasingly diverse. Furthermore, and much more importantly, countless more LGBT youth of color will face the degrading, subhuman treatment of being rejected as full human beings by not only their peers, but by their parents and closest family members.
And it starts with those of us who happen to be young, black, and gay.
To stay in the closet is no longer an option. If you prefer the Afro-centric term of "down low", whatever. It's all the same. A lie is a lie by any other name.
Between age 14 and 20, I lived in such a lie. It was a gradual, but steady process to realize that by doing so, I was not only hurting myself but hurting an entire community.
The time is now.
We cannot possibly hope to win over a majority of those in the elder generations who have been raised from their earliest years believing that to be gay is to commit an unspeakably disgusting sin, something that is not "innately black." There will always be outliers in those communities - people such as my maternal grandmother - who defy what the statistics would predict and reject the notion of inequality in the 21st Century.
But for the most part, let's be realistic - those generations are out of reach. It would be a waste of time to expend a huge amount of energy and money trying to win them over.
For young African Americans, it is different. Not only can we win them over, we must. If homophobia is allowed to calcify amongst the African Americans of under 30 years old today, the movement for LGBT equality will continuously run into massive roadblocks in an America that will only become increasingly diverse. Furthermore, and much more importantly, countless more LGBT youth of color will face the degrading, subhuman treatment of being rejected as full human beings by not only their peers, but by their parents and closest family members.
And it starts with those of us who happen to be young, black, and gay.
To stay in the closet is no longer an option. If you prefer the Afro-centric term of "down low", whatever. It's all the same. A lie is a lie by any other name.
Between age 14 and 20, I lived in such a lie. It was a gradual, but steady process to realize that by doing so, I was not only hurting myself but hurting an entire community.
The time is now.
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