First Things First—Secrets, Silence, Stigma, Shame
Today’s issue of The On-The-Other-Hand News comes to you via Ginia Bellafante’s article in the New York Region section of The New York Times from Sunday, June 30, 2019. Its title is: “‘Everybody Ain’t Surfing This Rainbow Wave’: Why Divisions Endure in Gay Rights.”
Composer and author Michael R. Jackson, author of Off-Broadway musical hit A Strange Loop, says it all, “It is your self-hatred that will kill you,” he said. “Secrets, silence, stigma, shame—that is the virus.”
Mr. Jackson’s show addresses “the internalized bias that black gay men experience and the perilous self-doubt that stems from it. He had been enraged by the shallow Queer Eye representation of gay life, propagated by what he calls the ‘gaytriarchy,’ a model revolving around the consumer habits of white gay men.”
Now that Pride has settled its glorious feathers for at least another year, I want to come down on Mr. Jackson’s very correct side. Yes, HIV/AIDS is a devastation. Believe me, I know. One of my closest friends has it, and I lived through the early 80s on Broadway. Ms. Bellafante’s article draws much needed attention to the fact that not everyone was thriving during Pride. Not this year or any other.
Don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying, don’t be proud. Please, be proud, but also be aware of your queer brothers and sisters who still struggle—and at the base of whose struggle is the virus Mr. Jackson calls out. There’s an AA saying that holds here: you’re only as sick as your secrets.
What are ours?
I’ll tell you one of mine. I’m a femme. A high femme. Which means that I come out all the time to all kinds of people—because they never think I’m queer.
I know queers who are appalled that anyone identifies as femme. Really. Mostly, I tell them MYOB.
But because trans people, queer persons of color, and especially, trans women of color—who were the bravest of the brave at Stonewall, suffer every day because of who they are, I can’t hide who I am. Not trans, not of color, but definitely queer and definitely femme, and that’s just how it is. If I do hide who I am, I am contributing to their oppression.
On a teeny, tiny scale, I have felt oppression—miniscule, really—and I didn’t like it. How would I feel if I had no choice, but that my very being drew oppressive focus, remarks, aggressions? I cannot begin to imagine, and I don’t want to, but I do want to stand outside the Queer Eye contingent and say, I see you. I’m sorry. I can’t fix it, but I can and do stand with you.
Before reading Ms. Bellafante’s article, I didn’t know this about Pride:
“Initially the celebration was to be held under the banner of ‘Gay Power,’ but one organizer, Craig Schoonmaker, objected to the designation. Too few people in the world ever acquire any real power, he argued. The term ‘pride’ seemed better suited. ‘The poison was shame,’ he explained in an interview many years later, ‘and the antidote is pride.’ Pride was something that anyone could achieve.”
I agree with Mr. Schoonmaker. The poison is shame. There is no place in this world for anyone to be ashamed of who they are. No place. No one. Not ever.
The serum antidote would indeed seem to be pride, but proud as I am to be a queer femme, unless I’m proud of my whole tribe, then I may as well just stay silent and stay home. I can’t and I won’t. Not till we’re all safe—and proud.
‘Everybody Ain’t Surfing This Rainbow Wave’: Why Divisions Endure in Gay Rights
In the 50 years since Stonewall, many strides have been made. But for gay people of color, the battle for equal rights isn’t over.
CreditCreditBrittainy Newman/The New York Times
· June 28, 2019
In January of 1966, Time magazine published an essay called “The Homosexual in America,’’ which offered a glimpse into mainstream perceptions of gay life. It accepted the consensus that homosexuality was the result of a “disabling fear of the opposite sex,” concluding that such an orientation was “a pathetic, little second-rate substitute” for a meaningful life, a “pernicious sickness.”
It was within this context that the Stonewall uprising, whose 50th anniversary has drawn millions of visitors to New York this month, unfolded in June of 1969. After years of enduring police raids on gay bars, where men and women faced arrest for simply dancing with members of their own sex, the patrons of the Stonewall Inn were suddenly moved to retaliate.
What transpired from that galvanizing moment and over the course of the next half-century was a movement to upend the prejudices and misapprehensions that had taken such deep root in the national psyche. It was a vibrant movement that would directly lead to the decriminalization of sex, workplace protections, the freedom to openly serve in the military, to marry, to live unremarkably.
While the struggles for women’s rights and racial equality have never been regarded as nearing an endpoint, the campaign for gay freedoms has inched closer to a sense of victory and completion. Same-sex marriage is constitutionally protected; there is an openly gay candidate for president; the chief executive of Apple, one of the most profitable companies in the world, is a gay man.
And yet the broader gains of the movement have been distributed unevenly. From the inception, it was infused with class tensions that have continued to play out over the intervening decades, creating very different benchmarks of success for those living far outside the parameters of the white professional elite.
The breadth of the gap was clear at a recent Pride rally in the Bronx. It was a celebration, to be sure, but also a political call to arms, held in front of a courthouse on a bright Sunday morning at the same time that a party was underway on a rooftop in Midtown Manhattan — the “Pride Luminaries Brunch,” a tribute to business leaders. In the Bronx, oration came from local elected officials and activists, outlining where priorities ought to lie.
Sean Coleman, who a decade ago liquidated his 401(k) to start an L.G.B.T.Q. community center nearby, took the stage early on, talking about the misplaced cultural focus on the need for gender-neutral bathrooms when “black trans women are being slaughtered in the street with just a hashtag acknowledging their existence.’’
He mentioned Layleen Polanco, a transgender woman who had been arrested on misdemeanor assault charges in April and wound up on Rikers Island because she couldn’t afford the $500 bail. Earlier this month she was found dead in the jail, where she had been placed in solitary confinement. He read the names of black transgender women who had been killed around the country this year. He lamented that the masterful forces assembled for marriage equality seemed to have disbanded even when so much work still needed to be accomplished.
“Everybody ain’t surfing this rainbow wave,’’ he said to a crowd that seemed to understand this intimately.
When Mr. Coleman started the center, Destination Tomorrow, he said later, he wanted to focus on economic hardship. The Bronx has a household poverty rate of 28 percent, 10 points higher than the citywide average and more than double the national rate. Transgender people are multiply burdened. They have problems with identification, for example — their paperwork might not match their presentation — and this can get in the way of finding work, which in turn can get in the way of finding safe and decent housing.
“There was just a lot of neglect in terms of what people needed to be gainfully employed,’’ he said. “Folks thought ‘mission accomplished.’”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also appeared at the rally, taking to the microphone in a similar spirit. She explained that the Bronx remained the front line in the fight for L.G.B.T.Q. rights in New York City. “Pride is about honoring that front line,” she told the audience.
Since the advent of medical advances more than 20 years old now, H.I.V. has been a manageable chronic illness rather than a terminal one. But in low-income communities of color, H.I.V. and AIDS remain central to the conversation in ways outsiders rarely recognize. Of the 1,790 people who died of AIDS in New York City in 2016, 1,471 were black or Hispanic, and more than half were living in extreme poverty. Across the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control, African-Americans accounted for 43 percent of H.I.V. diagnoses in 2017, though they represent just 13 percent of the population.
Earlier this month, the musical “A Strange Loop’’ made its debut to acclaim and sold-out performances Off Broadway. It addresses the internalized bias that black gay men experience and the perilous self-doubt that stems from it. The writer and composer, Michael R. Jackson, had been enraged by the shallow “Queer Eye’’ representation of gay life, propagated by what he calls the “gaytriarchy,’’ a model revolving around the consumer habits of white gay men.
In the play, AIDS figures prominently. And a few months before it opened, Mr. Jackson’s collaborator, also black and gay, died of AIDS. He had failed to get the treatments that surely would have saved him because he decided that God was rightfully punishing him, Mr. Jackson believes. Increasing access to a category of drugs known as PrEP, which reduces the risk of getting H.I.V. from sex by more than 90 percent, will do little, Mr. Jackson argues, for people who don’t have the sense of self-respect and entitlement to take them in the first place.
“It is your self-hatred that will kill you,’’ he said. “Secrets, silence, stigma, shame — that is the virus.”
One year after the Stonewall uprising, in 1970, a committee was formed to determine how to commemorate it, and the idea of personal esteem emerged as a crucial aspect of the discussion. The plan was to march and offer other events over the course of a weekend; visitors would be invited from out of town.
Initially the celebration was to be held under the banner of “Gay Power,’’ but one organizer, Craig Schoonmaker, objected to the designation. Too few people in the world ever acquire any real power, he argued. The term “pride’’ seemed better suited. “The poison was shame,’’ he explained in an interview many years later, “and the antidote is pride.’’ Pride was something that anyone could achieve.
In the earliest days of the movement though, affluent white men rarely embodied it. There was often enough at stake — at home, at work — to make authenticity and protest too great a risk. “The more you had to lose, the less you were involved,’’ said David Mixner, a longtime activist who has advised presidents and prime ministers on issues involving gay rights.
When Joyce Hunter, one of the leaders of the first gay rights march on Washington, in 1979, was a student at Hunter College, she observed that her middle-class peers were more hesitant to enter the vanguard of the resistance than she was as a black lesbian who had grown up in an orphanage and later public housing.
“No one wanted to be the spokesperson for a gay-rights group,” she said. “I was out, and I didn’t care who knew.”
This disparity is not lost on people like Mr. Coleman, a black transgender man, who pointed out in his speech at Bronx Pride that marginalized people — drag queens, queer women of color — gave birth to the movement. They were there at Stonewall, and before. How, he wondered, were we honoring their heirs now?
Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine. @GiniaNYT