Oct. 4, 2010
As we deal with what is undoubtedly a frightening rash of teenage suicides in the LGBT community, most involved within it are frightened, nervous, and insecure about what the next steps are. Unfortunately, some have decided to join in the time honored tradition of shoving the blame onto the nearest scary black man, this time targeting rapper/actor/knucklehead 50 Cent for a vulgar tweet. As unenviable the position of defending someone like 50 Cent is, I'm compelled to say something about the disturbing familiarity of the situation.
The subject of the community's ire this time is a tweet that he sent to his presumably straight male followers that said something to the effect of "If you're a man over 25 and you don't *perform oral sex on women*, you may as well kill yourself!" The tweet was made in the perfect storm of grief in the LGBT community about 5 gay teen suicides that have been publicized in the past week, and gay and gay-friendly celebrities as diverse as Perez Hilton and Zachary Quinto have taken 50 to task for his "homophobic" comments in the virtual high-school cafeteria that is our online social networking world. The 50-hate has then viral, resulting in the predictable race-baiting posts and comments on the most popular gay blogs. Sigh. Is this really the most positive course of action right now?
I wouldn't feel compelled to call out the behavior, especially in regards to someone who has made some very real homophobic comments in the past, if it weren't so typical of the gay community. Indeed, every time the community feels backed up against the wall due to an issue, it predictably pushes back against some real or mythical African-American contingent that seems to rile up the base and breathe fire on the blogs.
While latent race problems have always persisted in the gay community in some fashion, the "Black Bogeyman" syndrome, as I call it, seems to have appeared in force right around the time of Barack Obama's election in 2008. As historic as his election was, it came unfortunately wrapped in a time of crushing defeat for the community, as California's gay-marriage banning Prop 8 passed. One faulty CNN exit poll indicating 70% of blacks being in favor of Prop 8 later (when the final numbers were in they hovered closer to 55%) and it was open season on blacks in the gay community.
Race-baiting blogs and "commentary" by such influential people as Dan Savage followed soon after, with the former writing a piece on his popular blog titled Black Homophobia that was so incendiary in its content and the racial hatred spewed from its readers that it was removed within hours of posting (the link is to a cached page.) It's also interesting to note that during this time black gay voices were nowhere to be found in any mainstream media coverage.
In the years since, Barack Obama has become the biggest black bogeyman of them all in the gay community due to his perceived lack of movement on gay issues. And you know what? He is moving slowly. Much too slowly. However, there has been a bizarre and disturbing racial angle seeping into the conversations about what Obama is doing, and about how his race factors into it. Americablog gay's outrageously offensive article Does The White House Understand That a Black President Cannot Institute a Policy of Segregation? isn't even the half of it, and the disturbing thing is that this is what is coming from our alleged leaders under the cover of fighting for our rights. This is only the beginning, and a few clever google searches will undoubtedly uncover the rest.
So I bring it back to my original question that at a time when LGBT teenagers of all colors are taking their own lives, is attacking 50 cent or really any singular entity what we need to focus our energies on? An African-American LGBT teen rooted in hip-hop culture may or may not take offense to 50's arguably innocuous tweet, but I'm sure that teen will take offense when they go looking for community online and discover the vicious race-baiting and breathless claims of "black homophobia" that has become normative in the place of direct action to fix the problems that we all face. As long as the LGBT community continues to seek out the black bogeyman as a all-purpose punching bag for all of our frustrations and oppression, we're never going to get anything or anywhere, and we'll certainly do nothing but alienate potential heterosexual African-American allies and put those like myself who are black and gay into an awkward "us or them" position that helps nobody.
These teenagers deserve better than this from people purporting to stand up for them. After attending the powerful and deeply moving candlelight vigil for these kids at Washington Square Park in New York City on Sunday, the most overwhelming message was that the answer to the problem at hand isn't hate, it's love. What the gay teens still with us deserve to see is a community that is bound by our love for one another and not shared hate directed outwards. What they deserve is to feel like the part of a community no matter what their skin color is, and not to feel like they have to choose sides. That's what these kids would want to see, and that's what we should show them. Love overcomes hate every time. Perhaps it's time to take the hate out of our activism.
