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D.C. held its 18th annual Black Pride event in May. Some black gay rights activists say homosexuality is often perceived as a choice and that many fear that gays are seeking ‘special rights.’ (Blade photo by Henry Linser)
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HOME > NEWS > NATIONAL NEWS
By: JOSHUA LYNSEN COMMENTS
 
Research shows opinions stubbornly unchanged despite growing mainstream acceptance
Next week: How gay activists are working to engage blacks and win their support. |
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There’s a typical response H. Alexander Robinson hears when he talks to black people about gay rights.
“There are those in the community that continue to say the whole gay agenda is about special rights,” he said. “In lots of segments of the community, I feel like we’ve addressed that and moved on from that question. But I still feel like it’s being framed in that way by certain African-American ministers.”
Robinson, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, said he and other gay activists thus are pitted against religious and political influences as they work to win support from black Americans.
And those influences are strong.
The Pew Research Center found in July 2006 that 52 percent of black Protestants consider homosexuality “just the way that some people prefer to live.” According to the survey, 22 percent of white mainline Protestants say the same.
The survey also found that 20 percent of black Protestants say homosexuality is something people are born with, and 60 percent say that homosexuality can be changed.
By comparison, 52 percent of surveyed white mainline Protestants say people are born gay and 22 percent say homosexuality can be changed.
Positioned near the sensitive intersection of religion and politics, gay rights can prove a volatile topic for many audiences.
But Rev. Larry Brumfield, a black pastor at Westminster Church of the Brethren in northern Maryland and a gay rights supporter, said some of his most heated discussions on the topic have been with fellow blacks.
“I think religion plays a large role in it,” he said. “I think it’s because of miseducation in the pulpit.”
Brumfield, who is straight, said black congregants too often are wrongly told that gays choose their sexual orientation.
“They see it as a choice, almost as a manipulative choice, rather than a natural order of things,” he said. “And if it’s a manipulative choice, ‘They are not doing this just because they’re sinful and lustful and out of control people. They’re doing it to get a leg up on us as a group, as black people. They’ll get the job. They’ll hire them before they hire us. And they’ll get this privilege before us. And they’ll be competing for a scarcity of rights and privileges.’”
Robinson said part of the problem gay activists face in countering such misconceptions is that many black congregants accept without question what they’ve heard from the pulpit.
“Lots of individuals have not been forced to consider another option,” he said.
Cuc Vu, chief diversity officer for the Human Rights Campaign, said education therefore becomes essential to securing new support.
“The reality is that many members of the African-American community believe you can choose to be gay, but you cannot choose to be black,” Vu said. “We need to create safer spaces for African-American GLBT people to come out and challenge the perception in the African-American community that there are no gay black people.”
Brumfield said such steps could help diffuse the us-versus-them “siege mentality” that exists in some black churches.
“I think that we as a group, as a community, after we get certain rights and privileges prescribed to us, we put our arms around them and hoard them and say, ‘You can’t have them,’” he said. “Some of my brethren preachers from the pulpit target this as a competitive position, or position this whole concept as, ‘Gays, lesbians and transgenders are in competition with black folk for jobs, rights, privileges and those things,’ which is totally nonsense to me.”
A complicated dialogue
But no matter the legitimacy of such concerns, gay activists said the dialogue they’re working to develop with black Americans is complicated.
Robinson said activists must be particularly careful to avoid referencing any “hierarchies of oppression” that might present the struggles of one group as more difficult than those of another.
“The first thing is that we just need to call it out,” he said, “and be very clear that when individuals are discriminated against, regardless or whatever the logic or the reason given, we all have to stand against it.”
Robinson said such steps also are important because surveys show that discussing gay issues with black Americans in a civil rights context can be problematic.
Four years ago, black voters generally agreed that they ...
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