St. Mary's at PENN

Dear Friends in Philadelphia and Elsewhere,

Before hundreds of us go off to Philadelphia City Hall on Saturday or to rallies elsewhere to rage against the outcome of marriage equality initiatives in last week's vote, I implore you to read this. It's really important--so important that I am breaking a self-imposed silence about my experience as Director of the Philadelphia AIDS Consortium in the early and mid-1990's.

As some of you know, I have spent a lot of my life as a GLBTQ and HIV/AIDS activist in Philadelphia and to some degree nationally. During the early and mid 90's I was repeatedly and some would say severely castigated as Director of the AIDS Consortium for improperly driving federal and state HIV/AIDS funds away from African-American community based prevention and care efforts toward organizations perceived as and in most cases in fact largely white "owned and operated." Despite some sense of vindication when it was discovered that some of the leaders of some of the African-American organizations were in fact dishonest (but that was also proved true of at least one white based organization, a fact which few made very much of), the general point made against me, I now believe, had real merit.

Like those in the vanguard of the current struggle for equality in marriage, I am white; and in cultural terms in this country, where the notion of "post-racial" is about as valid as the idea of "post-gay," that whiteness may be the most important thing about me, socio-economically-culturally speaking. That being said, I am, in the latter years of my life, seriously about the business of owning and exploring my own racism and trying to combat racism, not just as a matter of individual behavior but as a product of hundreds of years of white legal, economic and institutional hegemony in the United States. It is out of my experience as a white gay man and from the point of view of someone shaped by and enmeshed in that white hegemony that I now ask other white GLBTQ people the following very important and urgent questions:

--why do I see so very few faces of people of color in those many photos of demonstrations against the Prop 8 outcome in the pic section of http://jointheimpact.wetpaint.com/?t=anon?
--if those pictures mean, as I suspect, that African-American and other LGBTQ people of color are much less invested in the marriage issue than white men and women, why is that?
--what does an analysis of the California vote for Prop 8 by race and class tell us about where people of color generally and African American people specifically stand on the issue of LGBTQ marriage equality?
--how might that knowledge guide future organizing efforts, from the new get-go, which needs to be beginning right now?
--is it in us, who are white, to engage people of color in a mutually respectful and serious conversation about how we can move forward together on this issue while at the same time perhaps, as white people, taking much more seriously issues of great urgency (far more urgency than marriage, I would suggest) that trouble, at best, and lay waste to, at worst, communities of color all over the country--issues of deep and fundamental human rights like freedom from poverty, assurance of decent health care, a real quality education, real access to the job market, real involvement in the places that shape how we see ourselves in this country (could there just please please please be a commitment to more than a token number of people of color in our Christmas catalogues, for instance? or in the commercial face of television and the Internet?)?

Something is broken in our organizing fabric, and I believe that torn fabric reflects accurately the broken state of our community. In the late 1970's and early 1980's, when many of us were organizing and negotiating for Philadelphia's early gay and lesbian civil rights protections, the building blocks for so much achieved since then, we were advised and joined, publicly and powerfully, by a substantial contingent of powerful and respected African American community and religious leaders, including the Black Clergy of Philadelphia. Where are these allies and friends now? How have we, who were then allies, become so alienated? More important, how can we repair and strengthen those bonds as we reorganize to achieve the many remaining goals of the struggle for LGBTQ rights?

I would suggest that we white folks have once again lost our way and that a large measure of the alienation falls to us who have created it by accepting gladly that early alliance but then turning our backs on the other urgent needs and aspirations of our then allies. Having achieved a measure of civil equality in the city, we return to our white assumptions, privileges, and ways. We adopt children, but engage hardly at all in the urgent fight in Philadelphia to rebuild public education. We grow businesses; but mainly they are businesses in and for what I call white world. We engage in powerful real estate enterprises; yet the face of those enterprises is nearly always white. Red lines shift but don't change. We reshape whole communities (Mt. Airy and Northern Liberties come to mind) but we can pretty much color them white too. We are increasingly engaged in Philadelphia's vaunted health care industry; but even as that sector flourishes, community health and mental health systems serving the city's poor crumble. And this is just the most obvious stuff of our abandonment.

We need something very different.

I would suggest we begin with that analysis of the California vote and that we take what it tells us seriously. I suggest we self-consciously craft a new alliance of GLBTQ leadership that is from this new beginning both black and white, in which people of color are drivers of a shared agenda and not just taken for granted because we share sexual orientation or a "history of oppression." I suggest we assiduously avoid comparing our struggle with the struggle of black people in the United States; those of us who are gay and white have certainly suffered the dangers of living for so long in places where our kind of love dared not speak its name; some of us have died in those places. Yet none of us has been owned. None of us has lived or died the property of another. None of our families have been sundered by the rape and destruction of entire communities. None of us lives under that very low and still visibly crystal clear glass ceiling that denies equality and access to people because of race. Barack Obama is one man who has achieved greatness by forging a new coalition; behind him all these other battles remain, and their resolution will depend far more on the coalitions we are able to repair or rebuild than on the Obama victory.

So, to get very specific, in Philadelphia, white gay men and women have largely abandoned the HIV/AIDS wars to which we brought so much passion and so much of our wealth when AIDS was "our" disease (though it never really has been white, in this city or anywhere else). What's up with that, when a recent op ed in this week's Philadelphia Gay News by the Black Gay Men's Leadership Council, COLOURS, Inc, and The House of Blahnik summon all of us to come together to find new answers to this community epidemic now in its 27th year, today as always claiming a hugely disproportionate share African Americans in the still huge number of those newly infected each week in our city? We should join with this coalition of black gay leaders to insist that Philadelphia understand why HIV incidence among MSM is 20% LOWER in Philadelphia than nationwide at the same time as incidence our communities of color continues to soar. Clearly we M who have S with M are doing something right. Right there may be the beginning of a new alliance. Yet the epidemic persists and grows elsewhere. I think if we could find ways to change that, we might find new ways toward other equalities we'd klike to see.

Is it too much to suggest that the BLGMC, COLOURS, House of Blahnik Community Forum this Thursday, November 13, at 6 PM at the Arch Street United Methodist Church (Broad and Arch) to summon new energy and devise new strategies in the fight against HIV/AIDS in communities of color is at least as important, and perhaps more important, in our common struggle for equality as Saturday's City Hall rally for marriage equality? If we really want to forge a new alliance that will work for shared goals and real civil equality, then white GLBTQ people will be there on Thursday, not to hi-jack a culture or a movement but to learn from them and to offer again our lives and our resources to save the lives and assure the fundamental rights of our sisters and brothers of color? That just might be the start of something truly new. Maybe I'll see you there.

Peace to you all,

Jim