A Fragile Union

From the digital archives: Commentator Tammy Johnson's take on gay Black alliances and author Rinku Sen's reflections from 2008 when California began marrying same-sex couples.

You can learn a great deal about the state of gay politics by walking along Manhattan’s West Side Highway late in the day on the first Sunday of any June. Like the surrounding West Village neighborhood, the highway’s promenade will be packed, cheek-by-jowl, with reveling queers who have just marched through the city in honor of gay pride. But you’ll quickly notice something distinct about the post-parade mass crammed between the highway and the Hudson River: It will be overwhelmingly Black and Latino.

Travel a few blocks west or north, into the heart of the city’s gay neighborhoods, and the demographics change starkly. The crowd suddenly turns lily white, as house music drowns out hip-hop, and muscled, tanned torsos replace voguing Black and Latino youth. The transformation is so dramatic that it begs the question of whether the two scenes are even related. As a white friend earnestly asked me the first time he ventured to the side of the parade tracks, “Are these people all gay?”


The visual and cultural dissonance of the world’s largest gay pride celebration reveals a stubborn reality about gay life—and thus gay politics—40 years into the movement for sexual freedom: Once the marching and the chanting is done, the multihued cry against a universally felt oppression usually breaks down into deeply segregated, often opposing parts. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community organizers have for years debated whether that reality matters to their political goals, whether the community’s divisions are meaningful enough to cripple efforts to create equality on everything from marriage rights to schoolyard safety.

Last year’s ugly fight over marriage in California ought to finally settle the question.

From the campaign’s first days to its lingering post-election recriminations, an inability to deal with race undermined California’s struggle for same-sex marriage every step of the way. Throughout the campaign, activists of color, both inside and outside of the LGBT community, complained that its leaders failed to take people of color seriously and that they’d be punished on election day for doing so. Since the campaign’s end, polls suggesting those activists were correct have ignited outrage among white gays and lesbians directed at people of color, Blacks in particular. As Stephen Colbert quipped a few days after the election, “The new conflict is gay versus Black, Black versus gay!”

All of it has left gay and lesbian Americans reeling. It’s highlighted the fact that the more important word in the phrase “gay American” may well be American—people who are circumscribed and hamstrung by all of our unexplored fears and unfinished battles over race.
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California’s Proposition 8 served up what is arguably one of the gay rights movement’s largest setbacks ever—because it changed so much, so fast in a state of such great consequence to national politics and culture.

“The electorate has forced us to take a look at ourselves. Our whole progressive community is going to be strengthened if we do that.” ­—Dolores Huerta, United Farm Workers cofounder

Last May, gays and lesbians across the country celebrated a historic victory when California’s Supreme Court ordered that the state law defining marriage make room for same-sex couples. That made California only the second state, along with Massachusetts, to open up civil marriage. (Connecticut has since done the same.)