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 NEW YORK (AP) _ Gay is the new
black, say the protest signs and magazine covers, casting the gay marriage
battle as the last frontier of equal rights for all.
Gay marriage is not a civil right,
opponents counter, insisting that minority status comes from who you are rather
than what you do.
The gay rights movement entered a
new era when Barack Obama was elected the first black president the same day
that voters in California and Florida passed referendums to prevent gays and
lesbians from marrying, while Arizonans turned down civil unions and Arkansans
said no to adoptions by same-sex couples.
Racism was defanged by Obama's
triumph, leaving gays as perhaps the last group of Americans claiming that
their basic rights are being systematically denied.
``Black people are equal now, and
gay people aren't,'' said Emil Wilbekin, a black gay man and the editor of
Giant magazine. ``I always have this discussion with my friends: What's worse,
being a black man or a black gay man?''
``Civil rights have come much
further than gay rights,'' he said. ``A lot of people in the gay community have
been condemned for their lifestyle and promiscuity and drugs and sex, so it's
odd that when they want to conform and model themselves after straight people
and have the same rights for marriage and domestic partnership and adoption,
they're being blocked.''
In a cover story for the Advocate
magazine titled ``Gay is the New Black,'' Michael Joseph Gross wrote, ``These
past few years we've made so much progress that we'd begun to think everybody
saw us as we see ourselves. Suddenly we were faced with the reality that a
majority of voters don't like us, don't think we're normal, don't believe our
lives and loves count as much or are worth as much as theirs.''
Yet even some gay leaders are
reluctant to directly tie their fight to the African-American legacy. They
acknowledge significant differences in the experiences of gays and blacks,
ranging from slavery to the relative affluence of white gay men to the choice
made by some gays to conceal their sexual orientation, which is not an option
for those with darker skin.
``I believe we are very much in a
modern-day civil rights struggle,'' said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human
Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay rights organization.
``We liken some of the experiences
that we have had and will have to the (black) civil rights struggle. We also
are enormously respectful of the differences,'' he said. ``What we are best
served doing is when we take lessons from the civil rights experience and apply
them to our work.''
Complicating the issue is the
domination of minority politics by blacks and Latinos, who can be less than
friendly to gay issues.
In the vote on Proposition 8 in
California, which repealed gay marriage, about 70 percent of blacks favored the
ban, according to an exit poll; Latinos' close vote may have favored it, though
the poll's small sample left some uncertainty. In Florida, 71 percent of blacks
and 64 percent of Latinos favored a similar ban.
Opposition to gay rights often has a
religious basis, and blacks and Latinos are more churchgoing than society at
large. Twenty-six percent of blacks attend religious services more than once
per week, compared with 16 percent of Latinos and 14 percent of whites,
according to a 2007 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
``I do not consider (gays) to be a
minority in legal and adjudicated terms, the same way people who only like to
eat broccoli with butter aren't a minority,'' said the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez,
president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. ``We can't
categorize things according to behavior. It's based on ethnicity, on who we are
rather than what we do.''
``Who am I to say that you weren't
born that way ... (but) sexual activity, what you do, who you sleep with, is
your business,'' Rodriguez said. ``That's between you, your lover, and the good
God Almighty in heaven. I don't want to know. Let's leave sexual activity in
the bedroom. The government shouldn't be legislating what we do behind closed
doors between two consenting adults. And to compare it to the African-American
struggle, to me that's an abomination.''
So is gay the new black, or did the
election define a new and unique set of gay challenges?
``The gay fight for marriage has its
own integrity, its own background,'' said Andrew Cherlin, a professor of
sociology and public policy at Johns Hopkins University. ``The experience of
blacks in the United States is very different. ... I don't think it helps the
fight for equality to make that claim.''
Cherlin says that fight began in the
1980s when the AIDS epidemic unfolded. Gay partners had few rights to help
their ailing loved ones, visit them in hospitals or inherit their property,
which led to the push for civil unions.
Today, only Connecticut and
Massachusetts permit gay marriage, and a few states allow civil unions or
domestic partnerships that grant some rights of marriage. Galvanized by the
stinging Nov. 4 defeat in liberal California, the marriage movement is now as
much symbolic as practical.
``There was a shift in the '90s,
from rights to the symbolism of being married,'' Cherlin said. ``This is not
primarily a battle about rights now. If it was, all you'd be hearing about is
domestic partnerships. Now it's at two levels simultaneously. One is the level
of rights; the second is the level of symbols.''
One symbol that some see missing
from the gay rights movement is a figurehead. There are famous people who are
out and proud, such as Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., or Ellen DeGeneres. But ``we
don't have our Martin Luther King or Malcolm X or Barack Obama,'' Wilbekin
said.
Yet the nature of activism has
changed since the days when King proposed the idea of a mass march on
Washington. The recent nationwide gay protests were instigated by a Seattle
blogger who set up a Web page three days after the California vote.
And in some ways, gays see Obama
himself as a symbol of gay progress _ even though he opposes gay marriage.
Obama is in favor of civil unions,
and during his victory speech, when he included gays in his description of
America, it made them feel part of the historic racial milestone.
Solmonese said that the election
defeats of Nov. 4 have inspired a level of gay activism not seen since the
early days of the AIDS epidemic.
``That is buoyed by equal parts
anger and rage about Proposition 8,'' he said, ``but also hope and inspiration
about doing something that for a long time we didn't think possible _ like
electing Barack Obama as our president.''
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