gay is the new black?

Proposition 8 passed in California on November 4th, 2008 and The Advocate released its issue #1021 in December 2008, featuring the text "Gay is the New Black" on its cover ... and I'm just now blogging about this all on February 16, 2009.  The issue remains: race and racism must be addressed among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer communalities, sexuality and heterosexism must be addressed among communities of color, and the relationship between LGBTQ and communities of color must be assessed and improved.

I'm sure most people know the story by now: immediately following the November 4th election in the US, statistics were released indicating the passage of Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage in the state of California.  Included in these numbers were breakdowns by a variety of sociodemographic variables.  The number that caused quite a stir: an overwhelming majority of Black voters in CA approved the proposition.  These numbers were taken out of context, leading to an explicit blame for the proposition's passage on Black Americans.  Although later reports, including one from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, report a much lower percentage of Black voters who supported the proposition, the issue remains: racial hostility among LGBTQ people reared its ugly head.  Even today, with a much lower number of Blacks favoring the proposition's passage, critiques of anti-prop 8 activists efforts to reach out to Black communities, and general critiques of the weakness of activists efforts to educate voters about the content and potential impact of the proposition, many LGBTQ people harbor anger toward communities of color, specifically demonizing them for their (perceived) resistance to marriage equality. 

I want to focus particularly on the rhetoric that has emerged in the months following the election: "gay is the new black."  I want to first dismiss the allusions to anything relating to fashion (e.g., "pink is the new black").  In most contexts, including the aforementioned issue of The Advocate, the users of this phrase are noting that LGBTQ people are the last minority group to face discrimination and mobilize to demand and successfully achieve full equality in the US.  The most troubling concern I have for this rhetoric is the assumption that all other marginalized groups that have faced prejudice and discrimination and who have sought full equality now have that full equality.  People of color and women, who are probably the most obvious groups with respect to sociopolitical mobilization, by no means have full equality today.  Although a number of laws and policies explicitly demand for gender and racial/ethnic equality, these laws and policies are often subverted, ignored, and misinterpreted.  (Why else would there be entities like EEOC in the federal government?)

Second, the phrase "gay is the new black" implies that LGBTQ people have just now emerged to demand sexual and gender equality.  The history of sociopolitical mobilization for sexual and gender equality dates back at least to the early 20th century.  At a minimum, we should not forget that the earliest organized movements were in the 1950s and 1960s, including the Homophile movement, which was later replaced by the Gay Liberation Movement.  We are doing ourselves a disservice by denying our own history.  Finally, I find it somewhat arrogant to claim that we represent "the last great civil rights struggle" as the subtitle of the aforementioned issue of The Advocate suggests.  How could we possibly predict what the future holds?  Given the history of humankind, we can almost expect that more inequality will occur, and continue to occur, and more groups will mobilize to demand full equality.  I'm not sure whether this sort of rhetoric (namely that of "civil rights", which is problematic as well) is aimed at stirring up the next wave of organized LGBTQ activism in the US, but it seems to pull on nostalgic notions of social movements from the 1950s-1970s that do not reflect the current LGBTQ "movement."

Coupled with this rhetoric is often responses, discussion board comments, and blog posts that either implicitly or explicitly compare the struggle of LGBTQ people with communities of color, and, less so, women.  With respect to mobilizing against the dominant powers, it does not matter whether Blacks, or women, or lesbians, or Latino transmen, or disabled bisexuals have had it worst.  This sort of quibbling only keeps us quibbling with each other.  To make real change for all people, thus challenging sexism, racism, homophobia, heterosexism, classism, ablism, ageism, xenophobia, transphobia, and biphobia, we must band together, or continue to see the success of the strategy of "divide and conquer."  Coalition-building is a must.  And, even if there are obstacles to bulding those bridges, each movement must ensure that it challenges every form of oppression, not just the one that seems most obvious to itself.