Movements

Just a reply I wrote to a friend that sent me a link to an article that talked about the leaders of the civil rights movement and their reluctance to reach out to the LGBT community.

"It does make me think. Even though civil rights and gay rights are very closely tied together, I don't know if we'll ever be able to mount a united front. While both issues are very much different in their core desires, they're the same in that both want to be treated like everyone else, want the same rights and the same opportunities.

Being a black gay man does have it's challenges. I'm part of both worlds, but I'm not caught up in the politics of either. I'm aware that the struggles exist, of course, I just don't feel as if I have anything to contribute to either struggle. I know how that sounds, but some people are born to lead and crusade, and others simply aren't.

A majority of the black community is simply too closely tied to their religion, and for that reason don't want anything to do with the gay community, even though both communities should be reaching out to each other as their final goals are the same. At the end of the day I think it comes down to identity. Both communities are trying to define themselves through themselves and not through the eyes of "the rest of the world." I think that's one reason black people are taking back the word n***a just as gay people have taken back the world f****t.

I was having a similar conversation about this with a friend. African-Americans really don't have an identity. We do, but we lost it during slavery. We lost our homeland, our families, our religion, our freedom. We did the best we could during slavery, taking the Christian religion as our own and American ideals as well. Take into account inbreeding and black people that wanted to please the whites in order to make their lives easier. We're part of two worlds and we have a hard time fully identifying with any of the heritages we have. For instance, I have Native American family members on both sides of my family as well as Caucasian. So I'm not purely African, not purely Native American and not purely Caucasian.

The same may be said of the gay community. There's pressure to act a certain way, present yourself a certain light in order to be accepted by the rest of the community, the rest of the masses. It's all about assimilation, fitting in. Groupthink!

You want to be part of your own community, and at the same time you want to be part of the larger, world community.

So if you look at it that way, both groups want to be viewed as humans, but as black humans and gay humans."