Ishmael Reed - Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico

I recently participated in two televised panel discussions about gay rights. In both cases, I was portrayed as the heavy. My fellow panelistsbright, young, black gaysconcluded that I was dwelling on the wrong side of history. Their language and style indicated that the LGBT movement, like the feminist movement, has been co-opted by the middle and upper classes, even though it was working-class black and Puerto Rican drag queens who were the trailblazers for gay rights. They were the ones who fought the vice squad on two historic occasions. First, in 1966 at the Compton Cafeteria at Turk and Taylor streets in San Francisco. Then, in 1969, black and Puerto Rican drag queens fought the police at the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan, an event that is regarded as the turning point in the struggle for gay rights. Nevertheless when Time magazine decided to mainstream gay marriage in April 2013, it wasnt the working class and underclass types who fought the battles appearing on the cover, but two middle class white women.

The first televised panel focused on whether gay studies should be taught at Morehouse College, a black all-male college located in Atlanta. Morehouse boasts such distinguished alumni as Julian Bond, Spike Lee and Martin Luther King Jr. I argued that instead of a course on gay history, Morehouse should begin a course about the labor movement, or business, since banks have been hostile toward black development since Reconstruction.

I also argued that if Morehouse has a course on the Harlem Renaissance, a movement of black intellectuals and artists of the 1920s, it already has gay studies, since prominent members Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, Bruce Nugent and others were gayincluding Alain Locke, who defined the term the New Negro . They shot down that idea, but I made out better than an alumnus, who said he was opposed to gay studies. He pointed out that in its history Morehouse has had gay professors and gay students without any problem. Boy, did they jump on him! He was banished to the wrong side of history, which reminded me of the old Sunday school pictures in which a giant hand points to the exit from the garden for an embarrassed Adam and Eve.

The topic of the second televised panel was whether gays were the new blacks. I said that before I cast gays as the new blacks, Id have to know whether the Montgomery Bus Company discriminated against white gays. Id also need to know the percentage of white gays on death row. Who had a better chance of getting a mortgage in San Franciscoa white gay or a black heterosexual? This question was inspired by a white gay gentrifier who told the San Francisco Chronicle that if blacks would stop buying Cadillacs and instead save money to make a down payment, they could have bought a home, too.

I also pointed out that black gay writers like Audre Lorde, Marlon Riggs and Barbara Smith have written about racism in the LGBT world and that David Brock, in his book Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative , had outed powerful right wing gays, including Matt Drudge .

When confronted with these arguments, my fellow panelists rebutted me with such slogans as oppression is oppression, which means their end of history, unlike the Marxist one, will resemble that of Downton Abbey . The upper class will be oppressed upstairs and the working class will be oppressed downstairs. And since the LGers have problems with the B and T parts, maybe the transgender folks will get jobs in the stables.

The smiley face that MSNBC attaches to same-sex marriage also conceals these fractures in the LGBT movement. Dr. Ardel Thomas, who has studied the culture more than talk-show hosts, calls it a chasm. Some gays see gay marriage and gays in the military as an attempt to normalize or assimilate gays. A 2011 San Francisco Human Rights Commission report spoke of discrimination against bisexuals by both gays and straights. Others want to remove the T from LGBT. There was no transgender among the participants on both panels.

I support gay marriage. But I dont believe white gay history and black history are interchangeable. They should stop comparing themselves to the condition of blacks. A gay icon, Oscar Wilde, supported the Confederacy and in our time, prominent gay pundit, Andrew Sullivan, supported The Bell Curve , which was supported by the Neo-Nazi Pioneer Fund.

Should the issue of gay marriage be front and center when the situation of other groups is more desperate?

When blacks and Hispanics see well-groomed gay presences like MSNBCs Rachel Maddow and Tom Roberts or Ellen DeGeneres as the faces of gay marriage or the gay movement, why wouldnt they say: What the fuck, we have more problems than those three. Thirty-six percent of Latino children live in poverty, and the black unemployment rate is 16 percent. As a result of the Welfare Reform Act people from all groups are rummaging through garbage for food. So what happens if the Transexuals and The Bis break away from the Lesbian and Gay parts of the LGBT on the grounds that the L and G parts discriminate against them?

Who will be on the wrong side of history then?

(Note: Covering the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, the media portrayed it as white led, ignoring the fact that transwomen of color began it. Among those was Miss Major, a black transwoman who said that white gay guys came and took it away from us. Her complaints were made on Vice News Tonight , June 13, 2019.)

First published in Playboy , Vol. 60, July/August 2013, pp. 63-64.

I think that the current intensified pariahization of black men began in the 1980s. As though the one-sided depiction of black men in popular culture, news, television, and Hollywood were not enough, a movie cowboy Ronald Reagan rode into the White House on a promise to suppress a revolutionary drive, part of whose energy was provided by black male enthusiasm. It was his opposition to the Black Panthers that boosted him from a failed actor and FBI informant to president. Co-founder of the Black Panthers, Bobby Seale, told me that when he and his fellow Panthers walked into the capitol grounds of Sacramento brandishing weapons, Reagan was addressing a crowd. Seeing them, he ran. Coincidentally, on the day I entered Bobby Seales home to interview him for my book, The Complete Muhammad Ali , he was watching the funeral of Ronald Reagan, a man whose career intersected with his.