Taking back the black gay movement

Before you cry foul, if what I am about to say doesn’t apply to you, keep up the good work. We need your support to get the job done for all of us. For those of you who read this and think me to be against marriage equality; I am not. Remember, I started one of the first black-led marriage equality campaigns in the nation—but enough with the disclaimers.

You may not know it, but there’s a contingency made up mostly of white gay people who are conspiring on ways to organize blacks. And not only do they want to organize blacks to spread their message of marriage for everyone, but they also want to do it through black gays.

Yeah, I said it. Somebody needed to.

The relationship between black gay organizations and some of the other gay groups is strained. Publicly, those groups embrace us and applaud our efforts as blacks, but behind closed doors they’re figuring out how to move us out of the picture and do the job that we are doing.

Did you know gay organizations are meeting every day to strategize on how to best mobilize black gays for the purpose of “diversity?” Those organizations have somehow gotten it into their heads that nonblack gays hold the key to breaking the cycle of homophobia in the black community.

Can you imagine that?

Let me get this straight, no pun intended. Individuals who are not from black communities—and know little to nothing about our community and for the most part aren’t even remotely interested in really working with our community—know how to talk to blacks about marriage.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, they’ve hired a few Negroes to be the black faces for their organizations so that they can get into rooms where traditionally they’ve been unwelcome. But don’t get me wrong. These Negroes-for-hire work overtime at earning their paycheck, at times even to the detriment of their own community.

Similar to the co-opting of black pulpits to spread the white conservative agenda during the 2004 presidential election, black gay groups are being taken over by the gay agenda, and nowhere is this more prevalent than in California, where one of the more prominent gay groups is working overtime at telling black gays what they need to say to black people about marriage.

To date, this group has hired a resident Negro who has no connection whatsoever to the black community, bought and paid for one of the few black gay groups in California, and is seeking to drive a “coalition” plan to get the other groups on board with their message. All of this in the name of diversity. Yeah, right.

But it gets even worse.

This gay group has now set its aspirations on black politicians in California after hearing from other black gays that it didn’t have a relationship with those officials. As with everything else, they’ve bypassed the black gay leadership and they are now trying to get the blacks in Sacramento on their team, using any method necessary—which usually means money and a lot of it. This is the reason black politicians and black leaders don’t know anything about the black gay leadership. Gay groups with more money beat us to the punch every time and take credit for everything.

Enough is enough.

Recently, one of the resident Negroes at one of the national gay groups announced that she had single-handedly held a meeting with the editors and executive officers of Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago. What she didn’t say is that she got the idea to have the meeting because a black gay group’s communications director, who quite frankly was wet behind the ears, called her and asked for Johnson Publishing’s contact information and leaked his idea about the meeting. Because she was faster and had more money behind her to arrange the meeting, she beat him to the punch and has now probably earned herself a raise.

It’s that kind of atrocious and cutthroat behavior that is destroying the black gay community.

Which is not to say that blacks working for national gay groups can’t do good work. But in its 20-plus-year history, this particular LGBT organization has never demonstrated a real interest in supporting the African-American community.

Black gays don’t need nonblack gays to organize them. We’ve been down this road before, and it’s not an effective strategy. Black gays can handle the black community on their own. You don’t see us trying to proselytize outside of our community on gay marriage in an effort to organize the LGBT community as a whole. What the hell gives others the right to come into our community and try to undo all of the years of hard work that black gays have put into fighting for our civil rights?

What is the use of having black gay groups if the gay leadership is going to trample all over us and use their money to overstep us at every point?