I posted this in GLBT and was advised to re-post it here.
Interesting these latest discussions over whether or not the current gay rights movement can or should compare itself to the 60's civil rights movement. I find it incredibly ironic. First, because it implies that people want to keep their "rights" movement, whatever it may be, special and unique. To be fair, they might be right that each movement is unique in time, place, people and such. But the way it comes across, especially if they take offense to the comparison, is that they are trying to make every other equal-rights-movement sit at the back of the bus.
I'm sorry, but that is how it's coming across.
Second...well, this insistence on there being no comparison implies that any GLBT movements are and have always been somehow separate from all other civil rights movements. So we're saying that there were no blacks in the civil rights movement who were gay? No women in the women's rights movement who were lesbians? Gays have never been separate from any movements. There were revolutionaries in 1776 who were gay, there were slaves on the plantations. Likely there were also gays on both sides of the American Civil War. Every religion has had its gay members, whether they were openly so or not. And every oppressed minority, harassed or abused member of a religious or ethnic group has also had gays among them. And, to be fair, there've been a good number of gays on the side of the oppressors.
Getting back to the main point, however: Gay blacks have suffered the same as heterosexual blacks. And, here's the real irony, they've not only had to deal with bigotry against their skin color, but also their sexual orientation and that from their own families and friends. This is why it's absurd to try and split hairs over the issue. Because the same black person who got chased by dogs and firehoses while marching for the right to sit at a lunch counter is the one who was told by his blood relatives, if ever they found out the truth about his orientation, that he could no longer sit at the family dinner table. (check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayard_Rustin)
It's been pointed out that skin color can't be hidden the way gay-ness can be. I think this misses the point, yet I'll pause a moment to remind those who argue this that there've been plenty of light-skinned blacks who passed, and Jews, not allowed in certain hotels or to join certain clubs, who changed their names and pretended to be WASPs. What does being able to "pass" have to do with the worthiness of a cause? Or trying to right a wrong? Or gain equality for a group that's being treated unequally and forcing people to pass rather than be themselves?
This is the point. It should be the one and only point. What matters isn't how much a group has suffered, why they have suffered, how long they have suffered inequality and injustice. Inequality is inequality. But what is most important is this: During the Civil Rights Movement, MLK compared the struggle of blacks in the south to the long bias suffered by Jews, and in doing so, made a connection with Jews. Many young Jewish people, far more than any other white group, came down South to face dogs and firehoses, to get beaten and even killed by racists in hopes of doing the right thing.
Consider that Prop. 8 passed in part because a great many black people voted in this election, and voted "yes on that proposition. If their college age kids can in any way be made to feel that GLBT fight is similar to that of their own 60's civil rights movement, maybe they, too, will stand up and fight the right fight. If, however, enough blacks insist that there's no comparison, or that they are offended by that comparison and GLBT should not make it, well then, they emphasize that it is okay to consider GLBT as a separate group. Not at all like or in anyway connected to them.
Not connected? Their fight is everyone's fight, not because they were like those people in the past, but because they were those people in the past. They know the injustice done to them because they were black or women or some minority religion, and they know their own, personal injustice, unrelenting, on-going...and related, in some way, to just about every family there is. I don't think their cause can be more like other causes than that. Who better to know how similar this current battle for justice is to those past, then ones who have had to face both? As has been said in other threads, anyone's cause against injustice and inequality is our cause. Not because they share our past, our skin color, or gender or our religion, but simply because they are human beings. And so are we. There is no movement for equal rights in the history of our species that is not rightfully comparable to this one because all such fights have to do with the rights of human beings. To try and say one group's fight for equality and justice had been, somehow, different, is to trivialize every other fight for such justice that has been or will be.
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