Jul 15, 2005  |  By: KEITH BOYKIN  | COMMENTS     

WHAT A COINCIDENCE that R&B legend Luther Vandross passed away in the same week when Terry McMillan’s divorce to a gay man became public and R. Kelly’s new “Trapped in the Closet” music video outed a closeted gay man.

Just hours after Logo launched the first ever gay television channel on basic cable, our heads were spinning with news that Vandross had died at the age of 54.

The night before, in the very first show to air on Logo — a documentary called “The Evolution Will Be Televised” — gay activist Urvashi Vaid had warned gays that visibility does not equal understanding.

She’s right, of course, but those of us who are black and gay are still struggling just to be visible.

Some black gay men who have been visible recently are not our best representatives. No matter what else he does in life, for example, Jonathan Plummer will always be remembered as Terry McMillan’s gay spouse, left to be immortalized like Bobby Brown being introduced to the Dali Lama as “Whitney Houston’s husband.”

McMillan’s husband claimed in court records that he did not know he was gay when he met and married his famous companion. Yet J.L. King, author of “On the Down Low,” quickly pronounced Plummer’s explanation not just implausible, but impossible.

“Nonsense,” King told the Washington Post. “He knew he was gay.”

I’M NOT SURE if Plummer is telling the truth, but his story is certainly plausible.

So how would King know the mental state of a 20-year-old Jamaican man he apparently never met? And how does someone like King, who can’t even decide if he’s straight or bisexual, become a spokesperson for black gay men? Welcome to the media depiction of black gays.

Just in time for the McMillan controversy — in a choice almost as ironic as the casting of the closeted gay actor Rock Hudson to play the San Francisco police commissioner in the 1970s television show “McMillan & Wife” — the producers at the “Oprah Winfrey Show,” on hiatus for the summer, scheduled a July 7 re-run of the controversial “down low” episode that first catapulted King to public attention 15 months earlier.

But there was another hitch to this story. Plummer accused McMillan of hurling hateful homophobic epithets at him after he told her he is gay.

I asked black gay author E. Lynn Harris, a personal friend of McMillan’s, and he told me, “Terry is not homophobic. It’s not fun going through a breakup of any sort,” he said.

THEN THERE IS Luther Vandross, the quintessential balladeer of our time, a wealthy and successful bachelor with a beautiful voice who, fat or thin, could have easily found a wife but never married and hardly even bothered to fake a heterosexual lifestyle.

When asked about his sexual orientation in a 2002 interview with BET, Vandross simply said it was none of their business. It was an honest answer that no straight celebrity would ever give.

But in the black community, we still subscribe to the policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which may explain why some blacks are upset by efforts to out Vandross posthumously, as if being gay would somehow mar his already extraordinary career.

What people don’t understand is that black gays and lesbians are desperate for affirming images of ourselves. While the white gays get Ellen, Elton and the “Queer Eye” guys, we’re stuck with the likes of King, Plummer and Othniel Askew, the black gay man who murdered a New York City councilman a year ago this month.

We rarely see positive stories about us in the media, and when straight blacks attempt to tell our stories, they depict us as scandalously as the closeted gay pastor in R. Kelly’s music video.

That’s why we’re so anxious to clutch onto Luther. We’re eager to find realistic images that reflect the true diversity of who we are. And that’s why we have to tell our own stories.

And maybe one day, a new Luther will sing our song instead of R. Kelly.