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Life After Prop 8
What can I say? What a bummer it was to wake up to the glory of Barack Obama’s election as President of the United States, and then to know that Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage, won in California. Talk about a buzz kill! And that doesn’t even count the conversations I’ve been having since then, with all kinds of people in all kinds of places, including members of my congregation who want to know how it could be that 70 percent of African Americans could vote in favor of Prop 8.
It was a relief to know that this was a statistical falsehood—many thanks to Jack and Jill Politics for posting the Daily Kos link that gives the lie to this propaganda! Nonetheless, I have been through this before, a long time ago, when one group of marginalized people (the LGBT community) felt marginalized by another group of marginalized people (African Americans). The first time someone presented the issue to me then, I drank the Kool-Aid, and was willing to imagine the extreme homophobia of the Black community. But I’ve lived a long time since then, seen firsthand the homophobia in white communities of the so-called “enlightened,” learned how many of my own family members were gay or lesbian, realized how committed I am to this issue, and discovered how easily the white LGBT community is willing to overlook its own racism and condescension for a chance to scapegoat an entire community.
Some of the conversation we are having right now is based in reality: in many quarters, the opposition to same sex marriage in the (not-at-all monolithic) Black community is theologically based. It takes a literal reading of Leviticus to get there, and I’m a totally non-literal lover of Scripture. But I also imagine several things: first, that there is what’s in the Good Book, versus what’s going on in real life–thus the persistent reality of African-American congregations populated with a host of gay and lesbian people who neither ask nor tell. Second, there is the legacy of racism, expressed via a horror among African Americans about any kind of sexuality that would even hint of our “abnormality,” and thus our non-humanity. Remember that, for centuries, we were the people who were the object of sexual fantasy and nightmare. We were exotic and unusual and dirty and bad and other. So many of us have, for a very long time, overreacted by being totally “straight-life” when it came to issues of sexuality. (Any black woman who’s been present for a late-night conversation about the boundaries around oral sex will know what I mean!)
Those of us who have learned to let go of the public relations version of black sexuality, however, and be our true selves, whatever our sexual preferences, nonetheless partially recognize the drill. Ours is also a recognition of the breadth and depth of sexuality and love, combined with real-life exposure to men who have loved men and women who have loved women longer than some of us have been in the world. And some of us continue to understand that nothing—least of all, sexuality—absolutely nothing, can separate us from the love of God. As a minister, it is this nuanced understanding I am working and praying for!
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