March 6th, 2008
Richard Burnett
rburnett@hour.ca
It's true, politics makes for strange bedfellows, and nothing was stranger than watching Barack Obama chum up to homos leading up to the Democratic primaries in Ohio and Texas this week.
"As your President, I will use the bully pulpit to urge states to treat same-sex couples with full equality in their family and adoption laws," Obama said in an open letter to America's gay communities.
Then the long-standing member of the evangelical United Church of Christ added, "I personally believe that civil unions represent the best way to secure that equal treatment."
That sounds like the old "separate but equal" laws American segregationists enforced, giving blacks the same public services such as schools, bathrooms and water fountains, though they were of poorer quality than those reserved for whites.
It's disheartening when anybody says bigoted crap like that, but it hurts me most when I hear it come from the mouth of a black politician.
Most galling are gay voters voting for the man who ripped a page straight from the Bush campaign playbook with his October 2007 "Embrace the Change" barnstorming tour of black churches to shore up African-American votes in South Carolina.
That tour featured deeply homophobic, Grammy-winning "ex-gay" gospel singer Donnie McClurkin, a clearly deliberate anti-gay wink from Obama to homophobic black churchgoers and voters.
If any other politician hired someone who denigrated Jews or blacks the way McClurkin trashes gay people, they would be crucified, and rightly
so.
But not Obama.
There is a rich history of anti-gay sentiment in black politics, notably the shunning of the godfather of America's black civil rights movement, Bayard Rustin, who was even betrayed by Dr. Martin Luther King.
The root of Rustin's isolation was his arrest in Pasadena, California, the night of Jan. 21, 1953, when Bayard (then 41) was found making out with two hot young studs in the back seat of a car. He spent 60 days in prison.
Then, while leading the push for a strong civil rights plank at the 1960 Democratic Party convention, Rustin was attacked by - believe it or not - Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. as an "immoral element" in the civil rights movement.
Powell demanded Dr. King drop Rustin or he'd tell the press that King and Rustin were lovers (they weren't).
So King - to whom Rustin had taught non-violent protest at the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott - told Rustin to get lost.
"Bayard was more upset, as I remember it, by the personal betrayal," Rachelle Horowitz, Rustin's personal assistant for 17 years, recalls in the 2003 doc Brother Outsider. "How could King let Adam Clayton Powell do this to him? I think it was one of the worst blows in Bayard's life."
Still, Rustin swallowed his pride for the movement.
When it came time to organize the Aug. 28, 1963 march on Washington, though, there was only one man who could do the job: Rustin, who was appointed deputy-director over the objections of Senator Strom Thurmond, who denounced Rustin as a faggot on the Senate floor.
But civil rights elder statesman A. Philip Randolph agreed to organize the march only if Rustin could work with him, and other civil rights leaders agreed because they wanted Randolph.
Meanwhile, Malcolm X was also as queer as a Three Dollar Bill.
Malcolm's bisexuality has been an open secret for years, at least since the publication of author Bruce Perry's acclaimed 1991 biography Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America (Station Hill).
But Malcolm - whom I affectionately call the Fruit of Islam - got married and had children. He'd seen what the black establishment did to Bayard Rustin.
When it comes to gay civil rights, though, the late Coretta Scott King - who publicly supported gay marriage - said in 1998, "Gays and lesbians stood up for civil rights in Montgomery, Selma, in Albany, Ga. and St-Augustine, Fla., and many other campaigns of the civil rights movement. Many of these courageous men and women were fighting for my freedom at a time when they could find few voices for their own, and I salute their contributions."
Today, it's true Obama is enlightened about issues like HIV, gay adoption and transgender rights.
Obama proclaims in his open letter, "I will never compromise on my commitment to equal rights for all LGBT Americans. But neither will I close my ears to the voices of those who still need to be convinced. That is the work we must do to move forward together. It is difficult. It is challenging. And it is necessary."
If Obama truly believes this, then gay Americans deserve an apology for his hiring of Donnie McClurkin.
It's too late to get an apology from Dr. King, but it's not too late for Obama.
Then, and only then, will Obama have earned the votes of Gay America.
http://www.hour.ca/columns/3dollarbill.aspx?iIDArticle=14149Copyright 2008 by Richard Burnett.
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