With this month commemorating the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War, I went combing through Civil War annals to finds our queer brethren — and did!

When shots were fired from Fort Sumter, a fortification near Charleston, S.C., signaling the war’s beginning, its gay Confederate and Union soldiers didn’t have to worry about Clinton’s infamous 1993 “Don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) policy, which blatantly discriminates against LGBTQ servicemembers.

Those soldiers, unlike today’s, did not have to bear their souls to disprove that military readiness is a heterosexual calling, nor did they have to prove that their patriotism to the cause was diminished because of their sexual orientation.

Gays served in the American Civil War.

If we go with our present-day queer census, it can be estimated that one Confederate or Union soldier in ten fell in our camp.

Some queer Civil War buffs would argue that none were dishonorably discharged — albeit, there is record of three pairs of Navy sailors court-martialed for “improper and indecent intercourse with each other.” And “unit cohesion,” the big battleground issue in today’s military, believing that the “homosexual gaze” would be the root cause for the disruption — which was totally debunked by a2002 study — was not an issue.

Before DADT, our LGBTQ servicemembers were discharged under “honorable conditions” called “Fraudulent Enlistment.” More than 13,500 military personnel have been discharged under DADT, particularly Black lesbians, who have been discharged at three times the rate at which they serve.

But the question, some would argue, of who were LGBTQ servicemembers and who weren’t in the American Civil War is a disingenuous query since the words “homosexual” and “heterosexual” weren’t part of the American lexicon until thirty years after the war ended.

However, many would also argue that not having an “official” word like “homosexual” back in the day of the Civil War to depict same-sex attraction among soldiers does not negate our use of it to describe them in this present day.

And in combing through Civil War battle records of Confederate and Union soldiers, I find, they were not only slaughtering one another — many were also “loving” one another.

Learning about same-sex love among soldiers wasn’t Thomas P. Lowry’s focus when he sat out to pen “The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War,” the first scholarly study of the sex lives of soldiers in the Civil War.

This physician and medical historian reminds me of Alfred Kinsey in his research on human sexuality. Using archival documents such as court-martial and medical records, newspaper articles, pornographic books and cards, and letters and diaries of the soldiers, Lowry’s focus was to address the problem of prostitution — straight and gay — and why both the Union and Confederate Armies had to work to stop STIs (sexually transmitted infections) from crippling their soldiers, because STDs were costing more in soldier’s health and lives than action on the battlefield.

Chapter 11 of Lowry’s book opens the closet door on gender-bending and same-sex trysts. And Lowry reveals that during the Civil War conventional gender roles and sexual behavior could not be strictly tethered to a heterosexual paradigm. With men outnumbering women, especially at social events like balls, “Drummer Boys” — children as young as 9 and 10 years old — dressed in drag. And in some occasions, the intimacy between soldiers and Drummer boys reached beyond just a public waltz.

For example, Lowry references a ball put on by a Massachusetts regiment stationed in Virginia in 1864 about young drummer boys dressed as women. One man wrote to his wife: “Some of the real women went, but the boy girls were so much better looking that they left. …We had some little Drummer Boys dressed up and I’ll bet you could not tell them from girls if you did not know them. …Some of [the Drummer Boys] looked good enough to lay with and I guess some of them did get laid with. …I know I slept with mine.”

History proves that LGBTQ servicemembers have been proudly and openly putting our lives on the line for their countries since antiquity.

The Greeks favored gay and bisexual young men in their military. Since gay and bisexual men were considered a family unit, the Greeks knew that paired male lovers assigned to the same battalions were a military asset. They would fights courageously, side by side, and would die heroically together in battle. Alexander the Great (356-323 BCE), who was king of Macedonia and noted as one of the greatest military conquerors, was probably openly bisexual. When his lover Hephaestion died in battle, Alexander the Great not only mourned openly for his lover, but he staged an extravagant funeral, which took six months to prepare.

Lowry is not the first to write about Confederate and Union soldiers in the Civil War, but he is the first to recognize an LGBT presence in it.

And what faith can anyone have in a Church that says it stands on the teachings of Jesus yet violates his biblical mandate stated in Mark 10:14: “Let the children come to me; do not try to stop them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”

But when you have a pope more invested in doctrinal debates than personal suffering, and more invested in exerting his ecclesiastical power in defrocking dissident theologians than his priestly flock of sex predators, then it’s easy to comprehend why the decades-long pleas and petitions from Catholic parishioners – worldwide – to Pope Benedict XVI to do something never made anything happen.

When Pope Benedict XVI was known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (1977-2005), he sent out a letter on May 18, 2001 ordering all his bishops, under the threat of ecclesiastical punishment, to observe “papal secrecy,” keeping sex abuse allegations concealed from both the public and the police.

I know from personal experience that disclosing sexual misconduct by members of the clergy not only shakes one’s faith, but it also shakes the very foundation where one’s faith is housed — the church. But make no mistake, here, pedophilic priests — and the bevy of other priests that archdioceses have conspired to keep silent about for decades — are criminals whose victims are innocent children.

As an institution that vows to protect the old, the sick, the downtrodden, and all of God’s children, the Catholic Church has not only failed at its earthly mission, it has also failed at recognizing one of the places where it needs healing – sexual violence.

One of the reasons Catholic officials avoid implementing a zero-tolerance policy for its pedophilic priests is because the church neither sees nor understands pedophilia as a form of sexual violence. Its pervasiveness within the church, from its seminarians to its bishops, has anesthetized church officials to the severity of the crime and its effects, both on the victims and their families. Therefore, the Catholic Church closes its eyes in taking full responsibility and accountability for the abuse.

Some in the Catholic Church deflect attention from this issue by raising fallacious questions about a causality between pedophilia and homosexuality. However, in the face of overwhelming evidence by behavioral scientists to refute such a harmful and homophobic claim, the Catholic Church, nonetheless, believes that a homosocial and celibate atmosphere of gay men produces a preponderance of pedophilic priests.

Clearly the issue facing the Catholic Church is not about whether gay men or celibacy cause pedophilia. It is, however, about the church’s egregious neglect to address the issue of sexual violence by priests against children.

Pedophilia is a form of sexual violence. And as such, pedophilia is the expression of anger through sexual exploitation. It is the abuse of power and the use of force, such as manipulation, physical violence, and emotional coercion and extortion, which is expressed through sexual acts. Pedophilia is a violation to one’s sense of bodily integrity, and it maintains itself within ecclesiastical institutions when an ongoing cycle of abuse goes on unexamined and unaccounted for.

While the commonly held belief these days, given the media frenzy, is that Catholic priests have a patent on this form of sexual violence, pedophilia is not specific to one’s gender, race, class, sexual orientation, vocation, or religion. Viewed as a sin and not a crime by most clerics, pedophilia maintains itself in ecclesiastical institutions like the Catholic Church through a culture of silence, deception, and shame. And pedophilia is also believed to be overcome by daily offerings of prayers and penance — but not prosecution.

While pedophilia is a sin within a theological view because it is an ongoing act that exercises control in the life of the pedophile to the point that it enslaves the person and relegates him to a fallen state, pedophilia is also a crime within a legal view. After all, these men are sex offenders like any other sex offenders. If found guilty, they should be placed on sex offender registries as the law requires.

But the law will never prevail to prosecute these priests as long as the pope protects them.

Mo’Nique’s role juxtaposed to Sandra Bullock’s, who captures her Oscar as best actress in the movie “The Blind Side,” offers the hand of human kindness to a poor black child in need of parenting.

But the images African- American parenting have historically been viewed through a prism of gendered and racial stereotypes. And the image of Mo’Nique as the “bad black mother” and Sandra Bullock as” good white mother” is nothing new.

The images of the “bad black mother” have not only been used for entertainment purposes but also used for legislating welfare policy reforms.

For example, in Ronald Reagan’s era (1981- 1989), black motherhood was constantly under siege. These moms were depicted as Cadillac-driving “ welfare queens,” who had little to no ambition to work, wanted money for drugs, and wanted to continue, due to their uncontrolled sexuality, to have illegitimate babies in order to remain on welfare.

Reagan told a fallacious story about a African American mother from Chicago’s South Side who was arrested for welfare fraud that subsequently not only shaped public perception of black mothers but it also shaped welfare reform:

“She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.”

The story of Precious takes place in 1983. And while the book shapes the character Precious and that of her mother Mary within both the economic an cultural context of the Reagan era, the movie “Precious” does not. And this one-dimensional depiction of Mary conveniently reinscribes black mothers’ fear that haunts us daily — that we’re never good enough.

The feeling that we as mothers are never good enough was thrown in our faces also in Daniel Moynihan’s 1965 report “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action.” This report – also known as the Moynihan Report- states that the cause of the destruction of the Black nuclear family structure were women, giving rise to the myth of “the Black Matriarch.” The myth proposes that African-American women are complicit with white patriarchal society in the emasculation of African-American men by becoming heads of households and primary jobholders.

Lee Daniels, the director of “Precious,” has a knack for portraying monstrous black mothers on the silver screen. Halle Berry won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2001 for her role as bad mother in Daniels’ “Monster’s Ball.”

In this “post-racial” Obama era, the subject of race and the politics of black representation in films are constrained by neither political correctness nor moral consciousness. But Daniels would argue that the moral conscious of his “Precious” is evident by the film’s crossover appeal, but also by the universality of its message- the suffering and damage of child molestation at the hand of parents.

While Daniels’ film shocked and awed moviegoers across the country, many African American sisters, like Precious, didn’t find the film as liberating and cathartic as intended.

For many of these sisters- as with a lot of African American women- we saw not ourselves, but rather a modern-day version of an old racist stereotype.

Some African American woman told me they saw the character Precious as our culture’s new “Hottentot Venus.” Hottetot Venus was Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman from South Africa, who was forced to reveal her huge buttocks and labia to curious Europeans in a traveling human circus show. The “Hottentot Venus” has become the iconic image for portraying black female bodies as subhuman, and this image is still very much part and parcel of our culture’s social discourse.

“Portraying African-American women as stereotypical mammies, matriarchs, welfare recipients, and hot mommas has been essential to the political economy of domination fostering Black women’s oppression, ” sociologist Patricia Hill Collins writes in “Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment.”

“Precious” is no doubt an important film. But when the artistic portrayal of the characters and people Daniels is trying to bring to life in a new way reinscribes century-old stereotypes, Daniels -albeit with good intentions- has caused harm.

And if Daniels won’t take my advice on this, then he should just pause for a moment and go and ask his momma.

Bentley, a 250-pound African-American lesbian (who today we would consider transgender), was known as “America’s Greatest Sepia Piano Player” and the “Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs.”

Her fall from the entertainment spotlight, however, is a cautionary tale about what can happen to us during a repressive political era when both church and state are our enemies.

A talented pianist and blues singer, and one of the most notorious and successful entertainers during the Harlem Renaissance, Bentley cultivated a large LGBTQ following up until the 1950s. As an African-American woman whose success derived from her raunchy and salacious lyrics to popular tunes, Bentley not only openly sang about sex, but she also openly lived and celebrated her sexual orientation as an out lesbian.

“It seems I was born different. At least, I always thought so,” Bentley told Ebony Magazine back in the ’50s. “From the time I can remember anything, even as I was toddling, I never wanted a man to touch me. Soon, I began to feel more comfortable in boys’ clothes than in dresses.”

Known to perform in her infamous white tuxedo and top hat, Bentley’s gender-bending would label her by today’s queer lexicon as a “stone butch.” But in black queer parlance of that era, she was a “bulldagger.” And the police constantly harassed her for wearing men’s clothing.

By the ’50s, the country was on a campaign to restore traditional gender roles that were disrupted by World War II, and McCarthyism was its policing mechanism. Special attention, however, was given to LGBTQ people.

In February of 1950, McCarthy captured the nation’s attention with its anti-communist propaganda that the State Department was riddled with card-carrying members of the Communist party. Just two years prior, in 1948, the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had its most infamous case: the indictment of Alger Hiss. With the passing of the McCarran Act in 1950, all notable communists were registered as foreign agents, denied passports, and excluded from employment in both the government and in the defense industry. The witch-hunting did not only target real and imagined communists, but it also targeted the nation’s LGBTQ population with a vengeance.

After the 1948 Kinsey Report titled Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which reported that 37% of American males had at least one gay sexual experience to the point of orgasm the gay male population was now red-baited. Thought to be security risks, queers were barred from all branches of the military and civil service, and they were a constant target of not only police harassment but also of countless arrests in gay bar raids. Harry Hay, founder of the gay male activist organization called the Mattachine Society, was not only forced to abdicate his position as president but he also had to leave the group entirely because of his supposedly communist past.

The McCarthy witch-hunt had a small impact on the black community overall. But the two most noted during this era were W.E.B. Dubois and Paul Robeson . Dubois was the target of red-baiting by the HUAC because he chaired the Peace Information Center, an anti-atomic bomb group, and he co-chaired with Robeson the Council of African Affairs.

With the absence of 16 million men, predominately white, in the workforce, women, and ethnic and queer minorities filled those vacancies.

Women of the time not only assumed traditional career opportunities, but also traditional dress codes. Women wearing pants to work and on the street, and their availability to purchase pants in department stories, gave women in the ’40s and ’50s the freedom to dress down and still be viewed as acceptable.

For gender-bending lesbians like Bentley, the wearing of pants – usually confined to the privacy of their home, lesbian bars, and on the performance stage – was a welcomed freedom. However, without the consent of the time, except in the private and acceptable spaces where pants were permissible, Bentley wore pants since the ’20s.

As troubling as that was, especially given her public lesbianism, Bentley accosted the sanctity of marriage with her active participation in this country’s racial and gender obsession – interracial marriage.

Had her “woman-friend” been African-American, their coupling would have clearly been subjected to condemnation and jeering, but their same-gender loving relationship would not have conjured up the wrath, fear and disgust that interracial marriage did. With anti-miscegenation laws operating in all states until 1967, and with LGBTQ people today being denied both the right of both state and church weddings, Bentley single-handedly performed a coup d’etat against the institution of marriage and the prohibition against miscegenation. She married her white girlfriend in a civil wedding ceremony.

To punish her, the forces of McCarthyism and the Black Church made Bentley conform. After supposedly taking female hormones to cure her of her lesbianism, Bentley wrote an article for Ebony Magazine proclaiming, “I am woman, again!”

The Black Church stopped railing against her, and the black press lauded her conformity. Now as a churchwoman and ordained minister, the ceremonial act of compulsory heterosexuality had to be consummated. She married a man, albeit 16 years her junior.

With the church’s belief in a heterosexual paradigm as the model to showcase black humanity in order to win God-given civil rights, the dynamic between the black press and the Black Church set up a new sexual McCarthyism.

The cautionary tale here is that it is not so different today.

But Robinson, a man I have known personally for many years, is indeed dangerous, as the openness with which he lives his life presents an implicit challenge to an Anglican Communion whose center of gravity has been shifting, both geographically and theologically, for quite some time.

The firestorm ignited by the church’s first openly gay, non-celibate priest reached a pitch when Robinson’s future as a bishop was first confirmed back in the summer of 2003. The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams promptly released a statement anticipating potentially catastrophic consequences: “It is my hope that the church in America and the rest of the Anglican Communion will have the opportunity to consider this development before significant and irrevocable decisions are made in response.”

Shortly after his ordination in November, a group of nineteen bishops led by Robert Duncan responded by warning of an impending schism. It took less than two months for Duncan to then launch the “Network of Anglican Communion Dioceses and Parishes” (also known as the “Anglican Communion Network” or ACN), an innocuously named conservative action group whose raison d’etre seems to be opposition to gays in the Anglican Communion (as well as relief and development outreach to the global south, home to both the largest concentration of Episcopalians and, not inconsequentially, the most conservative). Since its launch in early 2004, the ACN appears to confine its work largely to conferences and press releases surrounding relevant legislation, but little more.

Sitting in St. Paul Episcopal Church in Concord, NH with more than 120 family and friends, I saw a man who for years, with indefatigable zeal, had testified before legislative committees for legal civil unions in New Hampshire. He can now do so with his partner of 20 years.

After the civil union procession had assembled at the back of the church I witnessed, along with Robinson’s and Andrew’s family and friends, the solemnizing of their civil union by the Justice of the Peace:

Welcome to all of you who have come to support Gene and Mark in their joining together in civil union… You have stood by them and supported them in these last few years when on this very day and in this very place, five years ago, their life together changed forever, with Gene’s election as Bishop. They are grateful beyond words to you, and welcome you as you witness their commitment to one another and their legal joining in civil union.

Five years ago at St. Paul’s an historic moment in the Anglican Communion took place, but so too began Robinson’s nightmare of biblical proportions. “I plan to be a good bishop, not a gay bishop. I’m so much more than my sexual orientation,” Robinson told the Associated Press upon his ordination.

From that historic first step, to last weekend’s ceremony, to next month’s gathering, Gene Robinson’s life has come to represent not just one man’s choices, but a symbol over which a global community grapples.

The Lambeth Conference, a once-a-decade gathering of archbishops and bishops united in Anglican brotherhood of the Church’s mostly white male club of heterosexual power brokers, remains preoccupied with Robinson’s sexual orientation. This core group upholds 1998′s controversial Lambeth Conference resolution which states that homosexuality is contrary to the teaching of Scripture, a resolution craftily brokered by a minority of conservative clerics in the Episcopal Church, USA as their firewall against Robinson.

The conference is scheduled to convene again next month but Robinson won’t be in attendance as he has not been invited by the Archbishop of Canterbury. When a fellow bishop queried Robinson on the appropriateness of scheduling his civil union just prior to the conference, Robinson, knowing that no date in the worldwide Anglican Communion’s calendar would be appropriate, told the Church of England Newspaper:

“Now I am being accused of intentionally poking a finger in Lambeth’s eye by scheduling the service in June. But if we’d waited until after Lambeth to announce our intentions, I’d be just as severely criticised for having been disingenuous and secretive about the civil union to assure an invitation to Lambeth. There is no time when our civil union will be acceptable to many in the Anglican Communion. But I will not be irresponsible to the partner and love of my life just to avoid giving offense.”

The Lambeth Conference has always been a club deeply concerned with who’s in and who’s out. But is the Church’s potential schism really about the theological rift that ensued after the consecration of Robinson? Or, is the brouhaha really about a church embattled with itself about how to be financially solvent and theologically relevant in today’s national and global competitive religious marketplace?

“In 10 years, when African bishops come to the microphone at this conference, we will be so numerous and influential that you will have to recognize us,” said Joseph Adetiloye, a retired official with the church in Nigeria, at the 1978 Lambeth Conference, according to The New Yorker.

While the US has approximately 2.2 million Episcopalians today, the center of Anglican gravity is neither here where Robinson resides nor in Britain with the Archbishop, but in Africa just as Adetiloye predicted. The approximately three million members in Kenya and nine million in Uganda do not begin to approach the 20 million in Nigeria, making Peter Akinola, Nigeria’s archbishop, one of the most influential men in the entire Anglican Communion and a fierce opponent of gays. Where Lambeth could once summarily dismiss the voices of bishops from Third World countries, as was clearly the case at the 1978 conference, it can no longer do so; their numbers are overwhelmingly important to the life of the Anglican Communion.

Given this demographic reality and its political ramifications, there’s little reason to believe that a resolution awaits the Communion at next month’s conference.

Meanwhile, Robinson and Andrew face the ongoing fallout with class and resolve. Questioned, challenged and criticized so often about the openness of his civil union in the months that preceded it, Robinson chose to include the answer in his new book, In the Eye of the Storm: Swept to the Center by God:

But why not just make it a “private” service—a solution offered by some in the Anglican Communion? But “private blessing” is an oxymoron. Although our service will be by invitation only, and out of sight of the press, our understanding of marriage is that the couple make their vows public, in the presence of the gathered community, seeking the community’s prayers and assistance in being faithful to those vows.

To relegate the blessing of a marriage to a private, secretive venue is to violate its very nature. When I was growing up I could never have imagined same-sex couples being “out,” never mind being married or partners in a civil union.

When it came time for the “Prayers of the People” in Saturday’s service, the Celebrant spoke hopefully:

I ask your prayers for Gene and Mark: for their life together, that they may be filled with God’s blessing and grow in love for each other in faithfulness throughout their life together. Pray for Gene and Mark.

Published June 11, 2008 in Religion Dispatches. 

In African-American communities – urban and rural – across the country, information about EC and its accessibility is negligible. Those women and communities that do know about EC face an uphill battle either finding pharmacies in their communities that carry EC, or finding informed and culturally competent pharmacists and staff that dispense the drug.

African-American women, who are besieged by a cultural iconography of black female sexuality that is wild and wanton, face a distorted reality. As a consequence, they have high rates of sexual abuse and assaults (but low rates of reporting them), have the highest percentage of unintended pregnancies, and have the highest number of uninsured and underinsured population of women in the country.

EC would greatly reduce the number of unintended pregnancies in the African-American community by affording women reproductive autonomy to invest in their health intervention and prevention care.

Reproductive justice is about access to information and the choices afforded to women. But without a multicultural and multifaceted EC awareness campaign to educate women about the drug and make it more easily accessible to them, a marginalized population of women will not have the choice to decide when they will or will not bear children. This has always been of crucial concern for African-America women, from slavery to present-day. Having control of their bodies and decisions that would provide them with the best self-care makes African-American women savvy health-care consumers and powerful health advocates for the entire community. Over-the-counter EC made accessible in black urban and rural communities across the country would be one commitment in the health care system to closing the health care gap that exists for African-American women.

Published on August 23, 2007 on  NARAL Pro-Choice America website at

http://www.bushvchoice.com/archives/2007/08/_contributed_by.html#more