The court

Bishop Eddie Long, one of the Black Church’s prominent pastors of “prosperity gospel” and bling-bling theology in the Southeast, is flashing neither his gold nor silver these days. The embattled pastor had hoped that settling a sex scandal lawsuit for an undisclosed amount against allegations that he used influence, trips, gifts, and jobs to coerce young males into sexual relations would close the lid on the matter. But the mess wouldn’t subside and trouble kept coming: he’s now stepped down temporarily from his bully pulpit.

Long has not created the homophobic climate in the Black Church, but he has certainly contributed to it. With a membership of over 25,000, Long’s church is the largest African American megachurch in the Southeast. And as the largest it can begin, with his sex scandal, to effect change by embracing a liberating, healthy, and holistic understanding of human sexuality. And in so doing, Long would be creating a model of pastoral care not only for heterosexuals or homosexuals, but most importantly, for himself.

The stage

While most Harlem churches won’t touch LGBTQ issues, various gay-friendly arts venues in Harlem will.

On April 26, 2011 the Harlem Stage premiered the new documentary short film, Marriage Equality: Byron Rushing and the Fight for Fairness, allowing the largest public dialogue on same-sex marriage by LGBTQ people of color in the country. New York native and award-winning African American gay filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris directed the film, sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign.

Harris tackles the continued hot-button issue in both the African American and LGBTQ communities. Civil rights: black vs. gay. Harris dismantles the false dichotomy of this ongoing debate by connecting the Black Civil Rights Movement of 1960s with the same-sex marriage equality movement of today. And he does it by focusing on African American Democratic Massachusetts State Rep. Byron Rushing, a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement who, in the past decade, took the campaign for same-sex marriage into African-American communities here in Massachusetts.

With over 200 LGBTQ people of color and allies in attendance at the Harlem Stage, renown gay African American Washington Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart moderated the forum on same-sex marriage with a panel that included entrepreneur and activist Russell Simmons; Cathy Marino-Thomas, board president of Marriage Equality New York; Human Rights Campaign board of directors member David Wilson; myself; and a host of rights advocates, political activists, and religious leaders.

Black colleges

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) as a whole have been slow to take on the public challenge on LGBTQ issues for a few reasons: Some schools were founded with religious affiliation, and Black colleges are no different from African American communities in general. But during “Coming Out Month,” the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s HBCU Program hit campuses again. In an effort to educate and organize students, faculty, and administrators in advocating for LGBTQ equality and social justice specific to each institution’s needs, HRC conducts annually the black LGBTQ Student Leadership Summit to help college age students to deal with strong family foundations that emphasize heterosexuality and strong conservative religious ties within the Black Church. “It takes a lot of courage to stand up on an HBCU campus and be proud of who you are,” said HRC Associate Director of Diversity Donna Payne. “That is why we support training this generation to be effective leaders that will change the course of what it means to be African American and LGBT.”

Memoir

CNN’s Don Lemon penned a memoir titled Transparent that will come out in September. In writing his book, Lemon said “the decision to come out happened organically.” In this era of acceptance of LGBTQ people in news broadcasting like Lemon’s (closeted) colleague Anderson Cooper, ABC’s “Good Morning America” weather anchor Sam Champion, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and her colleague Thomas Roberts, to name a few, one would wonder about the source of the media brouhaha with Lemon’s disclosure, especially since it was not secret at work about his sexual orientation.

“It’s quite different for an African-American male,” Lemon told Joy Behar on her HLN show. “It’s about the worst thing you can be in black culture. You’re taught you have to be a man; you have to be masculine. In the black community they think you can pray the gay away.”

And Lemon is right. With homophobia running as rampant in historically black colleges and universities as it is in black communities, there are no safe places for GBTQ brothers of African descent to safely acknowledge their sexuality or to openly engage the subject of black GBTQ sexualities.

Lemon resides in Atlanta. It’s the new black Mecca and the new “Black Hollywood” that it’s fondly called “Hot-lanta.” And it’s also dubbed the “down low” capital. The Black LGBTQ community applauded Lemon for coming out.

Public recant

Tim Hardaway, a retired NBA All-Star player, in 2011 stepped forward with a change of words.

“It’s not right to not let the gays and lesbians have equal rights here,” Hardaway told the crowd at a press conference organized by the “No Recall” group, an El Paso group opposing a recall of El Paso Mayor John Cook and two city representatives for their support to re-establish domestic partner benefits for same-sex and unmarried partners of city employees.

Hardaway, however, is the last person one would expect to speak out on behalf of a LGBTQ social justice issue.

In a 2007 interview on Miami’s sports radio station, “790 The Ticket,” Hardaway was asked how he would interact with a gay teammate. The topic came up because of fellow former NBAer John Amaechi’s announcement, in his book Man in the Middle, that he is gay.

“You know, I hate gay people, so I let it be known. I don’t like gay people and I don’t like to be around gay people,” Hardaway said. “I’m homophobic. I don’t like it. It shouldn’t be in the world or in the United States.”

A change of words helps bring a change of heart.

Film

Positive Black LGBTQs on the silver screen is an anomaly.

This paucity of black LGBTQ images not only maintains the lie that we don’t exist, but it has also allowed the African American community to retreat into a closet producing black homophobic flicks.

But the tide is turning.

A new film is soon to come out by writer-director Dee Rees titled Pariah, a semi-autobiographical drama which generated a lot of buzz at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. It’s both a coming-of-age and coming-out film about a 17-year-old black lesbian in Brooklyn falling in love and embracing one’s identity.

With Ramadan, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, and Christmas all going on this time of year, one would think that an all-inclusive seasonal greeting emblematic of our nation’s religious diversity would be embraced by us all with two simple words — Happy Holidays.

However, in 2011 the season’s greeting is a continued chapter in the culture war spearheaded by what the Christian Right calls the “War on Christmas.”

In upstate New York, the Batavia City School District will no longer celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah in classrooms, and the teaching faculty and staff are discouraged from writing and saying “Merry Christmas.”

This year the governor of Rhode Island, Lincoln Chafee, vexed his Republican colleagues by renaming the state house Christmas tree a “holiday tree.”

“The governor defended his decision by arguing that it is in keeping with the state’s founding in 1636 by religious dissident Roger Williams as a haven for tolerance — where government and religion were kept separate,” the Daily Mail reported.

On the Nov. 30, 2011 “CNN Newsroom” broadcaster Carol Costello shared her ideas about the war on Christmas.

“Fox News, as it does every year, went crazy. …I know, it’s ridiculous, depending on how you look at it. As political reporter Jason Linkins writes on The Huffington Post, ’There is no war on Christmas, never was.’ He goes on to write, ’in fact, many Christians, myself included, register a basic level of annoyance at the way the Christmas season now stretches back into October because we don’t really need a basic reminder of how to properly celebrate the birth of Christ or his divinity on the account of the fact there is a basic concept called faith that we keep in our hearts. …Is there really a war on Christmas?’”

Well, it depends not only on whom you ask, but also the type of Conservative Christian you are.

Many Christians will argue that the war on Christmas has been going on for decades, but it revved up again with a new band of Christian soldiers in 2005 in praising Fox News Channel’s John Gibson’s new book, The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse Than You Thought, the publisher writes:

“Christmas has been declared politically incorrect, and the situation is much worse than you realize. …At first it was just nativity scenes in the town square and other overtly Christian symbols. But now the secular militants have expanded their war on Christmas to go after things regarded by most Americans — and even by the Supreme Court — as innocent symbols of the federal holiday that is Christmas. You can’t say ’Merry Christmas’ at a school or office anymore; only ’Happy Holidays’ is acceptable. No more caroling in public. Friendship trees instead of Christmas trees. No more Santa Claus, treetop stars, wreaths, Christmas music — even instrumental versions! — or school performances of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Even the colors red and green are under attack.”

Along with Gibson going after the “Christian haters” and “professional atheists” were the combined forces of the usual cast of suspects like the Catholic League, American Family Association, and Bill O’Reilly — the Fox News anchor who on his show has talked up boycotts of retailers for not using the words “Merry Christmas.”

Using political and economic clout to cripple stores for not showing commercial deference solely to Christmas, the Christian Right desecrated the character of our multicultural holiday season.

In the 1970s, Evangelical Christians were so outraged by the secularization and commercialism of Christmas that they were protesting to “put Christ back into Christmas.” But now they want more commercialism for Christ, thus extolling materialism as piety as we see these churches’ radical shift from the pew to the marketplace.

In 2009 the American Family Association boycotted Target for using “Happy Holidays” in its advertising. The Catholic League that year boycotted Wal-Mart, and Bill O’Reilly promoted his “Christmas Under Siege” campaign that polices stores that use the phrase “Happy Holidays.”

I’m a Canadian; I’m probably not wired into the discussion that seems to be happening here. However, at the risk of pointing out the obvious: Wal-Mart is not a Christian organization. Nor are governments — peopleare Christians, not organizations. It’s not surprising then that, as a business rather than a Christian organization, Wal-Mart might choose to greet customers with a term that includes as many of their customers as possible, Peter Vogel of Goderich, Ontario Canada posted on the Google blog.

Seen as an attack not only on Christmas but also on Christians, the real question that this cadre of “Christmas saviors” wants to know is which “Christian haters” are on the front lines of this war.

William Donahue of the Catholic League told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough that the problem is “secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.”

And Pat Robertson said on his “700 Club” television show that the problem is Muslims.

“If people don’t like America and the traditions that made America great, let them go to Saudi Arabia, let them go to Pakistan. Yeah, they can go to Sudan and find a wonderful Muslim holiday.”

“Secular progressives are driving this movement,” Bill O’Reilly said. “They don’t want it as a federal holiday, they don’t want any message of spirituality or Judeo-Christian tradition because that stands in the way of gay marriage, legalized drugs, euthanasia, all of the greatest hits on the secular progressive play card. If they can succeed in getting religion out of the public arena…”

Truth be told, Muslims, secular progressives and Jews have never been the folks trying to abolish Christmas. Instead, it was once an extreme group of Protestants — yes, the Puritans. With the date of Dec. 25 deriving from the Saturnalia, the Roman heathen’s wintertime celebration, and with the date found nowhere in the bible stating it as the birthday of Jesus, the Puritan Parliament banned Christmas from 1659 until 1681.

The intolerance of a multicultural theme for this holiday has little to do with a heightened renewal of the birth of Christ by the Christian Right. Instead, it has much to do with a backlash spearheaded by Christian conservatives as the country continues to grow more religiously pluralistic. It’s a situation that threatens the centrality of the centuries-long stronghold evangelical Christianity has had on this particularly holiday.

As a Christian, I know that the central message of the birth of Christ is the embrace and celebration of human differences and diversity. And it is with this message that I know all people — religious and non-religious, straight and queer, black and white — can be included to enjoy and to celebrate and to acknowledge this season with one simple greeting.

Happy Holidays!

And its circulation was global.

“We are blessed with a large following of avant garde, artistic people. While most of our site visitors are in the USA, we have a good following around the globe. This we believe is largely due to our global prospective and the fact that the global people of color community are a priority with us,” said Ralph Emerson, publisher and founder of GBMNews.

Emerson has operated this publication out of pocket. And while clearly the cost of operation was prohibitive causing the eZine to cease publication, another reason, according to Emerson, is the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) communities of African descent’s lack of support for the online site.

“Our folk don’t rally around and support their own. When GBMNews started everyone rushed to it, but with the advent of Facebook the attention had shifted,” Emerson told Out in Jersey reporter Antoine Craigwell.

“We didn’t have a groundswell of support for the site and for the newspapers as I thought it should have had from the community. As a community, we don’t seem to work together and support each other as a collective, and as a result, it collapses,” Emerson stated.

In November 2009, when the Washington Blade folded, the nation’s oldest LGBTQ weekly, soon after its 40th anniversary, it sent a message about this era of digitized news, and the nation’s growing interest in Facebook.

But Emerson’s statement that LGBTQ people of African descent don’t support their own cannot be summarily dismiss as Emerson’s anger and bitterness for having to close shop. Rather his statement speaks about our black LGBTQ community’s history of not financially supporting projects that are beneficial for us.

“Many of us seat up in these homophobic churches and put money in the offering plate. Surely we can send money toward a healthy goal,” Glen Glover of Roslindale stated.

Issues of race, gender expression, and sexual orientation invite a particular type of news reporting. One of the biggest loss, with now no nationally recognized black LGBTQ print or online eZine, will be the unreported and underreported news of our lives. GBMNews did local, national, and international coverage of us.

A lack of financial support from the black LGBTQ community has contributed substantial to all the print and online black LGBTQ publications folding. I’ve had the pleasure of writing for all these magazines but sadly my tenure with these ’zines was short-lived.

In 2007, GBMNews was founded, an all-volunteer contribution site devoted to the LGBTQ community of color, by Ralph Emerson. In 2009, Emerson launched GBMMagazines and in 2010, he launched RadioGBM, a ground breaking Internet radio station with exceptional coverage of the music industry and emerging artists. I joined GBMNews in December 2009 when Emerson wrote, “I noticed your article submissions and I’m contacting in hopes that you will become a regular GBMNews contributor. I am certain our site visitors would enjoy your journalistic dispatches, your opinions, analysis, and distinctive observations.” But this Nov. 28 GBMNews, GBMMagazines, and RadioGBM shut their doors for good. “I’m going to take a few months off to think about my next direction. I’ve toyed for years with starting an arts business,” Emerson stated.

In 2000, Arise was founded by Glenn Alexander and the Rev. MacArthur H. Flournoy, Associate Director of the Religion and Faith Program at the Human Rights Campaign. The publication’s readership was the same-gender-loving community of people of African descent. Its mission was “to challenge the mind, encourage the spirit, and affirm the value of all sexually diverse people of African descent.”

In November 2003 the paper celebrated its 3rd anniversary of publication, and had become a national icon for the African American LGBTQ community. Sadly a month later, Arise folded. In an email blast to Arise supporters, the publishers wrote, “Despite our best efforts to remain in print, it has become cost prohibitive to continue to produceArise as we know it. It is not our desire to compromise its quality to remain in existence. Therefore, effective immediately we are closing the pages of Arise magazine.” Eight months since the decision was made to close the pages of Arise, a relaunch issue was slated for January 2004, but that too failed.

In the 1990s, Venus Magazine was founded by Charlene Cothran, a publication that for 13 years targeted the Black LGBTQ community. As a staple in the African-American community, Venus Magazine was the first and only queer magazine owned and operated by a black lesbian that spoke to and about the unique intersections of being black and LGBTQ in both the African-American and white queer communities. And Venus’loyal readership had hoped the magazine would do for its queer population what revered publications like Ebony and Jet magazines did for all people of the African Diaspora — that is, change society’s negative and misinformed perceptions about us.

Charlene E. Cothran sent shock waves throughout African-American lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities nationwide when she wrote an article entitled, “REDEEMED! 10 ways to get out of ’The Life’ if you want out!” In it, she wrote that she’s now not only “saved,” having turned her life over to Jesus, but “straight” as well.

And as a fledgling magazine with the threat of folding always hanging over its head, Cothran opted to take financial support in 2007 from black churches funded by white right-wing Christian organizations that emphasize “reparative therapies.” In fact, she opted to be her own magazine’s “ex-gay” poster girl, rather than let the magazine fold.

Those of us who read GBMNews will feel its absence, hopefully remembering why it’s not here with us.

The embattled pastor had hoped that settling a sex scandal lawsuit for an undisclosed amount against allegations that he used influence, trips, gifts, and jobs to coerce young males into sexual relations would close the lid on the matter.

But the mess won’t subside and trouble keeps on coming: Long’s wife has just filed for divorce, the church coffers and membership keep shrinking, and he’s now stepping down temporarily from his bully pulpit.

Casting himself as the underdog: first as the biblical David up against the Goliath, and now as Moses who had to keep his hands raised against the iniquities of his adversaries, Long would have done better to cast himself as an unregistered and unrepentant pedophile.

Who among us would not flinch at the thought of a “holy man” preying on children instead of praying with them?

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 for those inside of Long’s stained-glass closet at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, many have known of the bishop’s pedophilic penchant for pubescent boys, whom he calls “spiritual sons.”

And, sadly, some parishioners just didn’t care. “What he does in his personal time, he does,” said Adrian Jackson, a New Birth member for 21 years. “As long as he’s in there preaching, that’s what matters to me.”

Long, like too many African American ministers on the “down low,” has erected his bully pulpit denouncing gays while using his clerical authority to court and to covet vulnerable young fatherless males.

During his infamous anti-gay march in December 2004 titled “Stop the Silence,” which denounced same-sex marriage, Long stated, “In essence, God made Eve to help Adam replenish the earth. Woman has the canal…everything else is an exit. …Cloning, homosexuality, and lesbianism are spiritual abortions. Homosexuality is a manifestation of the fallen man.”

The pressure for Long to step down at New Birth, some would argue, has been more about the church losing money than its loose morals concerning the safety of children.

And in tackling the moral aspect of Long’s transgression, too many black Christian conservatives, have confused same-gender sexual violence with homosexuality, thinking purging the pulpit of homosexual preachers will resolve the problem.

“Bishop Eddie Long must Go! End the awful ’Sodom and Gomorrah’ practices in he Black Pulpit!,” stated a protest flyer the Commission Holding Religious Institutions to Sacred Trust (CHRIST) located in Memphis, TN, disturbed outside of the church.

“End the rising epidemic feminization of young black males! For his sins, crimes against black male humanity, obstruction of justice, and for using $25 million dollars of tithe-money to pay off an attempted cover-up of his practices of pederasty — Sodom and Gomorrah from the pulpit of the Full Gospel New Birth Missionary Church, where he perpetrated it against young vulnerable, impressionistic black males.”

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 ones faith is housed — the church. But make no mistake, here, pedophilic preachers, like Long, 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, New Birth has not only failed at its earthly mission, but it has also failed at recognizing one of the places where it needs healing — sexual violence.

One of the reasons many churches — Protestant and Catholic — avoid implementing a zero-tolerance policy for its pedophilic clerics 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, churches — like the Catholic Church and New Birth — close their eyes in taking full responsibility and accountability for the abuse.

Some, in the church, deflect attention from this issue by raising fallacious questions about causality between pedophilia and homosexuality. However, in the face of overwhelming evidence by behavioral scientists to refute such a harmful and homophobic claim, the belief persists.

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, emotional coercion, and extortion, which is expressed through sexual acts. Pedophilia is a violation to one’s sense of bodily integrity, and it is maintained 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 gay Catholic priests and closeted Protestant clerics 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 in our churches 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.

And 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. And Long’s name should be added to it.

As I prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday, I am reminded of the autumnal harvest time’s spiritual significance. As a time of connectedness, I pause to acknowledge what I have to be thankful for. But I also reflect on the holiday as a time of remembrance — historical and familial.

Historically, I am reminded that for many Native Americans, Thanksgiving is not a cause of celebration, but rather a National Day of Mourning, remembering the real significance of the first Thanksgiving in 1621 as a symbol of persecution and genocide of Native Americans and the long history of bloodshed with European settlers.

I am also reminded of my Two-Spirit Native American brothers and sisters who struggle with their families and tribes not approving of their sexual identities and gender expressions as many of us do with our families and faith communities.

“Yes, there’s internalized homophobia in every gay community, but as Native Americans we are taught not to like ourselves because we’re not white. In our communities, people don’t like us because we’re gay,” Gabriel Duncan, member of Bay Area American Indian Two Spirits (BAAITS), told the Pacific News Service.

And consequently, many Two-Spirit Native Americans leave their reservations and isolated communities hoping to connect with the larger LGBTQ community in urban cites. However, due to racism and cultural insensitivity, many Two-Spirits feel less understood and more isolated than they did back home.

But homophobia is not indigenous to Native American culture. Rather, it is one of the many devastating effects of colonization and Christian missionaries that today Two-Spirits may be respected within one tribe yet ostracized in another.

“Homophobia was taught to us as a component of Western education and religion,” Navajo anthropologist Wesley Thomas has written. “We were presented with an entirely new set of taboos, which did not correspond to our own models and which focused on sexual behavior rather than the intricate roles Two-Spirit people played. As a result of this misrepresentation, our nations no longer accepted us as they once had.”

Traditionally, Two-Spirits symbolized Native Americans’ acceptance and celebration of diverse gender expressions and sexual identities. They were revered as inherently sacred because they possessed and manifested both feminine and masculine spiritual qualities that were believed to bestow upon them a “universal knowledge” and special spiritual connectedness with the “Great Spirit.” Although the term was coined in the early 1990s, historically Two-Spirits depicted transgender Native Americans. Today, the term has come to also include lesbian, gay, bisexual, and intersex Native Americans.

The Pilgrims, who sought refuge here in America from religious persecution in their homeland, were right in their dogged pursuit of religious liberty. But their actual practice of religious liberty came at the expense of the civil and sexual rights of Native Americans.

And the Pilgrims’ animus toward homosexuals not only impacted Native American culture, but it also shaped Puritan law and theology.

Here in the New England states, the anti-sodomy rhetoric had punitive — if not deadly — consequences for a newly developing and sparsely populated area. The Massachusetts Bay Code of 1641 called for the death of not only heretics, witches and murderers, but also “sodomites,” stating that death would come swiftly to any “man lying with a man as with a woman.” And the renowned Puritan pastor and Harvard tutor, the Rev. Samuel Danforth in his 1674 “fire and brimstone” sermon preached to his congregation that the death sentence for sodomites had to be imposed because it was a biblical mandate.

Because the Pilgrims’ fervor for religious liberty was devoid of an ethic of accountability, their actions did not set up the conditions requisite for moral liability and legal justice. Instead, the actions of the Pilgrims brought about the genocide of a people, a historical amnesia of the event, and an annual national celebration of Thanksgiving for their arrival.

In 1990, President George H.W. Bush ironically — if not ignorantly — designated November as “National American Indian Heritage Month” to celebrate the history, art, and traditions of Native American people.

As we get into the holiday spirit, let us remember the whole story of the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers to the New World.

On a trip home to New York City in May of 2004, I went to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to view the UNESCO Slave Route Project, “Lest We Forget: the Triumph Over Slavery,” that marks the United Nations General Assembly’s resolution proclaiming 2004 “The International Year to Commemorate the Struggle Against Slavery and Its Abolition.”

In highlighting that African Americans should not be shamed by slavery, but instead defiantly proud of our memory of it, I read the opening billboard to the exhibit that stated, “By institutionalizing memory, resisting the onset of oblivion, recalling the memory of tragedy that for long years remained hidden or unrecognized and by assigning it its proper place in the human conscience, we respond to our duty to remember.”

It is in the spirit of our connected struggles against discrimination that we can all stand on a solid rock that rests on a multicultural foundation for a true and honest Thanksgiving.

And in so doing, it helps us to remember, respect, mourn and give thanks to the struggles not only our LGBTQ foremothers and forefathers endured, but also the ongoing struggle our Native American Two-Spirit brothers and sisters face everyday — and particularly on Thanksgiving Day.

So deep that it also impinges on the animal world.

Toronto’s zoo is splitting up a pair of same-gender penguins. These “Happy Feet” males, Pedro and Buddy — jokingly referred to as “Brokeback Iceberg” — have been nesting with each other for a year.

The reason for the boys’ split-up, a zoo official says, is because African penguins are an endangered species.

The pair has what’s known as a “social bond,” but it’s not necessarily a “sexual bond,” Tom Mason, the zoo’s curator of birds and invertebrates told the Associated Press.

“Penguins are so social they need that…company. And the group they came from was a bachelor group waiting for a chance to be paired up with females,” Mason stated. “They had paired up there, they came to us already paired, and it’s our job to be matchmakers to get them to go with some females.”

But Buddy, I opine, may have been involuntarily “on the down low” for breeding purposes until he was able to express his true penguin passion with Pedro.

According to the zoo’s curator, Buddy, who’s 21, had a female partner for 10 years and produced offspring, but his female partner died. Pedro, on the other hand, who’s 10, has yet to produce offspring.

While we can banter and bicker about the heterosexist actions of a zookeeper, our actions on animal homophobia aren’t any better.

For example, who would have thought that the politics of same-sex coupling of birds would a debatable topic in the marriage equality state of Massachusetts?

But during the summer of 2005, more than a year after same-sex married became legal in the state, Boston’s beloved pair of swans in the Public Garden — named Romeo and Juliet — had been having a love affair that dares not speak its name. And as Bay Staters bantered and bickered over whether the two should be allowed to stay together or be separated, these swans were being subjected to the same queries that have plagued same-sex couples in heterosexist societies for centuries.

Assuming that the swans were heterosexual until one of the couple’s eggs went unfertilized, Boston’s Parks and Recreation Department decided to conduct a “detailed gender test” by examining the swans’ reproductive organs. The findings disclosed that Romeo and Juliet were really more like Juliet and Juliet.

The city disclosed its findings, but very reluctantly, “for fear of destroying the image of a Shakespearean love story unfolding,” as reported in “The Boston Globe.”

But some people thought like Laura Elsheimer of Hudson, Mass., who told the “Globe” that the city “should have a Romeo.” And spokeswoman Mary Hines of the city’s Parks and Recreation Department told the “Globe,” “Each year when the swans go in, the kids immediately come to us and say, ’Which one’s Romeo and which one’s Juliet?’”

Where the public might think a male is needed to make them a complete or authentic couple, neither of the girls seems to be lamenting, “O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?” Why? Because on any given day at the Public Garden you saw them swimming happily together in the lagoon.

Moreover, the swans have been cohabiting for two years. Animal scientists have observed the monogamous nature of swans whether they are in opposite-sex or same-sex coupling — they stay with their mates until death, which can occur between 20 to 30 years.

While there was also debate whether Romeo should be renamed to reflect the swan’s gender, I can imagine Juliet saying about all this much ado, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Same-sex coupling is not a new phenomenon in the animal world. However, its disclosure and acceptance of it comes in a homophobic society that will attempt to pathologize it.

But in fact, scientists at Oregon Health & Science and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Sheep Experiment Station are discovering that all sexualities may be biologically driven. In a recent study on rams, researchers at OHS found that 8 percent are gay, but with such a low percentage finding, the Christian Right can still hold to its premise that homosexuality is an aberrant behavior and found only in those lost few.

More controversial studies on animal homosexuality, being denounced by Christian conservatives, are Bruce Bagemihl’s “Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity,” and the findings of Deric Bownds, a University of Wisconsin-Madison zoology professor. In fact, Bagemihl’s book was cited by the American Psychiatric Association in a “friend of the court” brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in theLawrence v. Texas case that lead to state anti-sodomy laws being found unconstitutional.

According to Bagemihl, homosexual activity occurs in more than 450 species of animals both in the wild and in captivity, and same-sex couplings in animals can be as enduring and life-long as they are in humans.

For the religious fundamentalists, however, these findings are discarded on the premise that man can fight such instincts whereas animals cannot because God has given us the capacity to reason.

“Yes, animals can be forced to perform homosexual acts, by depriving them from the possibility to perform their reproductive function in the natural way,” Shams Ali wrote in “Homosexuality Among Animals and Humans.” “All this means is that animals are not free — they are driven by their instincts. …But the difference between a man and an animal is that Man has reason, which he uses to control his instincts and urges.”

Let’s not forget how we have seen many religious fundamentalists express their distain for same-sex coupling in us humans with the well-known vitriolic protest placard: Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.

As for the fate of “Happy Feet” males Pedro and Buddy, being allowed to stay together is swimming in a homophobic tide.

But for us humans, the lesson here is that a heterosexual-only view of love not only constrains and constricts our human capacity to love one another, but it also limits our capacity to tell the whole story about the birds and the bees.

And we can thank Ellen DeGeneres’s watershed moment in April 1997 when she came out on her sitcom “Ellen.”

Today’s openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) television personalities are Neil Patrick Harris, Jane Lynch, Rachel Maddow, and Rosie O’Donnell, to name just a few.

And these personalities have helped pave the way in terms of our acceptance in society and in terms of our civil rights issues.

In Matthew Gilbert’s “Boston Globe” article last month titled “In With the Out Crowd,” he points out there is a growing indifference in now seeing openly LGBTQ actors, talking heads, and media personalities. In the article Neil Patrick Harris stated, “I must say the indifference that most people expressed was the greatest reaction of all — and a reflection of a nicely evolving culture.”

But as this culture evolves, sadly, there are only two openly LGBTQ African Americans media personalities I can think of — CNN’s Don Lemon, and comedian Wanda Sykes.

This paucity of black public LGBTQ figures not only maintains the lie that we don’t exist, but it has also allowed the African American community to retreat into a closet producing black homophobic horror flicks.

Being a couch potato last month during the Halloween weekend, I watched two — “Cover” and “Blind Faith.”

By the mid-2000s a sex scare hit the African American heterosexual women’s population when information emerged about some of our brothers who were living life “on the down low” — or “on the DL.” Many films, television shows, books, public discussions and churches criminalized black men “on the down low” for their “oversexed homo drive” killing straight sisters. “Cover” is a recycled quasi-Hitchcockian psychological drama exposing how being gay puts a strain on the entire family. “Cover” opens with Valerie Mass (Aujanue Ellis) being questioned on murder charges for killing a popular R&B singer who we later find out is DL, HIV-positive, and has inflected his wife with the virus.

When asked why he tackled this topic, Bill Duke, producer and director of the film told “Blackfilm.com” that “AIDS is a very, very, very vicious disease, particularly in the black community. Black women are the number one victims of AIDS in our country right now. It’s like an epidemic proportion and surely after I got involved in the project, my goddaughter came to the family and told us that she was HIV positive and she’s been married for 12 years. So, that’s the betrayal we’re talking about.”

“Blind Faith” is a father-son tragedy that take pace in 1957 Jim Crow America and questions black masculinity. Charles (Charles S. Dutton), the father, is the NYPD’s first African-American sergeant, and he plans a police exam for his oldest son, Charlie (Garland Whitt), who is gay and would rather study art. Charlie is accused of strangling a white boy to death and will be electrocuted, but the father’s homophobia prevents him from being there for his son.

Enoch Page of Amherst, Massachusetts depicted the film as “a brilliant study of black masculinity, whiteness, and homophobia.”

I was drained after I finished seeing these films.

Just as the films with black gay themes are problematic, so, too, are some of the well-known black actors who portray LGBTQ characters, making it difficult for African American viewers to see and to actualize LGBTQ Americans of African descent in a healthy and wholesome light.

For example, in Spike Lee’s 1996 film “Get on the Bus,” Isaiah Washington and Harry J. Lennix played a black gay couple (Kyle and Randall, respectively) in the midst of a breakup that gets played out in high homophobic drama in the cramped quarters of a group of African-American men taking a cross-country bus trip from Los Angeles to our nation’s capital in order to participate in Minister Louis Farrakhan’s historic Million Man March.

Playing the role of a black gay Republican Gulf War veteran, Washington imparts to the group the violent acts of homophobia and racism he incurred on an ongoing basis from his fellow comrades, like being purposely shot at by his own platoon because of both his sexual orientation and race.

But in 2007 Washington made a public apology to the LGBTQ community for the derogatory comments he deliberately and repeatedly made about his gay costar T. R. Knight’s sexuality.

Another example, is the black community’s dogged obsession of who is and isn’t LGBTQ. Part of what fuels the on-going flurry of queries concerning Queen Latifah’s sexual orientation was her spot-on portrayal of a butch lesbian in the 1996 movie “Set it Off.” Earlier this summer Latifah’s character on the show “Single Ladies” — which she executive produces — was accidentally outed, and worked out in a positive way for the character. Viewers and the blogosphere began to speculate that Latifah was channeling her personal life through her small-screen character.

In 1993, the multi-talented Will Smith played a gay character in ‘Six Degrees of Separation.” And for many in the African American community it was the first time a well-respected actor portrayed a gay character. But Smith portrayed a young mentally unbalanced gay con artist feigning an identity as Sidney Poiter’s son.

With a stready stream of negative black LGBTQ films, being both black and LGBTQ our lives will never be viewed as anything but a horror flick.

The National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC), in collaboration with the National Gay and Lesbian task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) released a groundbreaking study in September called “Injustice at Every Turn: A Look at Black Respondents in the National Transgender Discrimination Survey,” exposing both the structural and individual racism transgender people of color confront. The study is a supplement to the national study Injustice at “Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey.”

Because misinformation about transgender people in our country is rampant and egregiously offensive, its impact is deleterious. Transphobia in black communities has left these members of our community especially vulnerable. The statistics are stark:

Black transgender people had an extremely high unemployment rate at 26 percent, two times the rate of the overall transgender sample and four times the rate of the general population.

A startling 41 percent of Black respondents said they had experienced homelessness at some point in their lives, more than five times the rate of the general U.S. population.

Black transgender people lived in extreme poverty with 34 percent reporting a household income of less than $10,000 per year. This is more than twice the rate for transgender people of all races (15 percent), four times the general Black population rate (9 percent), and eight times the general U.S. population rate (4 percent).

Black transgender people were affected by HIV in devastating numbers. More than one-fifth of respondents were living with HIV (20.23 percent), compared to a rate of 2.64 percent for transgender respondents of all races, 2.4 percent for the general Black population, and 0.60 percent of the general U.S. population.

Half of Black respondents who attended school expressing a transgender identity or gender non-conformity reported facing harassment.
Nearly half (49 percent) of Black respondents reported having attempted suicide.

On a positive note, many Black transgender people who were out to their families reported that their families were as strong as before they came out. Black respondents reported this experience at a higher rate than the overall sample of transgender respondents.

Adding insult to injury is the lack of recognition our trans brothers and sisters receive for their contributions to our community. If any recognition is doled out, it is usually posthmoustly.

For example, the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) is an international event memorializing transgender people murdered because of their gender identities or gender expressions. The purpose of TDOR is to raise public awareness of hate crimes against transgender people and to honor their lives that might otherwise be forgotten. This event is held every November and honors Rita Hester, a 34-year-old African American trans individual who was murdered in her home just outside of Boston on Nov. 28, 1998. The crime kicked off the “Remembering Our Dead” web project.

Another example, in June 2006 the Ali Forney Center (AFC), in NYC, the nation’s largest LGBTQ youth homeless services center, aggressively launched an advertising campaign asking the simple question: “Would you stop loving your child if you found out they were gay or lesbian?” Carl Siciliano, Executive Director of the Ali Forney Center, stated, “Our goal was to address the rising rate of LGBT youth homelessness, particularly in communities of color.”

Ali Forney, for whom the center is named, was an African American transgender individual known as Luscious and was also a throwaway. And like many throwaways, Forney earned his living as a prostitute. Once stabilized with a roof over his head, Forney spent his remaining years dedicating his time helping his peers. On a cold wintry December night in 1997 at 4 a.m. Forney was murdered by a still-unidentified assailant.

Black transphobia, in this present-day and in its present form, many opine, has a lot to do with the social alienation from the dominate white LGBTQ community and the cultural and religious isolation from the African American community.

Trans brothers and sisters have not been the “other.” Black drag balls and then “drag houses” or “drag families,” as seen in Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary film “Paris Is Burning,” were comprised of primarily African American and transgender Latinos who lived in their communities. Their performance at drag balls illustrate how race, class, and varying ranges of gender identities and expressions, deconstructs notions of masculinity, and redefines what it is means to be a diva.

During the 1920s in Harlem, the renowned Savoy Ballroom and the Rockland Palace hosted drag ball extravaganzas with prizes awarded for the best costumes. Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes depicted the balls as “spectacles of color.” George Chauncey, author of Gay New York, wrote that during this period “perhaps nowhere were more men willing to venture out in public in drag than in Harlem.”

And with constant harassment by white policemen patrolling the neighborhood, making the trans community their conspicuous target along with public denouncements of them by black ministers — like the famous Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. of Abyssinian Baptist Church — Harlem’s trans community was, nonetheless, unrelenting with their drag balls, because they were wildly popular and growing among its working class. And these drag balls were covered in the black press:

“Of course, a costume ball can be a very tame thing, but when all the exquisitely gowned women on the floor are men and a number of the smartest men are women, ah then, we have something over which to thrill and grow round-eyed,” reported the gossipy black weekly tabloid “The Inter-State Tattler.”

The study “Injustice at Every Turn: A Look at Black Respondents in the National Transgender Discrimination Survey” gives us just a small window into the everyday lived reality of my transgender brothers and sisters.

In the words of the lesbian poet and scholar Judy Grahn, Halloween is “the great gay holiday.”

And this weekend of lavish costumed theatricality will attract everyone, but especially lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) revelers.

Back in the day Halloween, the night before All Hallows Day (All Saints Day), was linked to the ancient Celtic festival “Samhain” in the British Isles, meaning “summer’s end.” And because the celebration is associated with mystery, magic, superstition, witches and ghost, the festivity, not surprisingly, was limited in colonial New England because of its Puritanical belief system.

But today it’s an LGBTQ extravaganza that rivals — if not out-showcases — Pride festivals.

Long before June officially became Gay Pride Month, and October “Coming Out Month” for the LGBTQ community, Halloween was unofficially our yearly celebrated “holiday,” dating as far back at the 1970s when it was a massive annual street party in San Francisco’s Castro district.

By the 1980s, gay enclaves like Key West, West Hollywood, and Greenwich Village were holding their annual Halloween street parties. And the parades the night of Halloween did and still do draw straights and gay spectators out to watch.

Gay cultural influence on Halloween has become such an unstoppable phenomenon here and abroad that anthropologist Jerry Kugelmass of University of Florida published a book in 1994 on the new trend, titled “Masked Culture,” describing Halloween as an emerging gay “high holiday.”

“The ’masked culture’ first developed by the gays of San Francisco has reached across the lines of orientation — and now jumped across the boundaries between nations and languages. It’s not just a party. It’s an ideal of personal emancipation, self-expression and self-fulfillment — an ideal that loses none of its power when it takes the form of a sexy nurse’s outfit,” CNN contributor David Frum wrote last year in “Halloween craze started in gay culture.”

Nicholas Rogers, author of “Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night,” points out that while Halloween is enjoyed by everyone, “it has been the Gay community that has most flamboyantly exploited Halloween’s potential as a transgressive festival, as one that operates outside or on the margins of orthodox time, space, and hierarchy. Indeed, it is the Gay community that has been arguably most responsible for Halloween’s adult rejuvenation.”

Halloween allows many LGBTQ Americans at least one night annually, Oct. 31, of safely being out and “unmasked” while remaining closeted. The community revels the entire night like there is no tomorrow, and for many there isn’t. Like its pagan roots, Halloween provided an outlet for us cross-dressing and gender-bending LGBTQ outsiders who are ostracized by mainstream society.

As Halloween flourishes as a gay cultural phenomenon, so too flourished a backlash by the fundamentalist Christians with their “Hell Houses.”

And these Christians targeted our children.

(Believing Hell Houses are no longer up and running in 2011, I’ll speak of them in the past tense.)

Hell Houses were a contemporary form of both anti-gay bullying and witch-hunting. Created in the late 1970s by deceased fundamentalist pastor, the Reverend Jerry Farwell, Hell Houses were religious alternatives to traditional haunted houses. They were tours given by evangelical churches across the country design to scare and bully people away from myriad sins. And one of those sins is homosexuality.

In 2006 the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) put out a report titled “Homophobia at ’Hell House’: Literally Demonizing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth” explaining how hell houses specifically targeted youth.

“Instead of spooking youth with ghosts and monsters, Hell House tour guides direct them through rooms where violent scenes of damnation for a variety of ’sins’ are performed, including scenes where a teenage lesbian is brought to hell after committing suicide and a gay man dying of AIDS is taunted by a demon who screams that the man will be separated from God forever in hell,” the NGLTF stated.

A study published in the “Journal of Psychology “stated that a strong belief in Satan is directly related to intolerance of LGBTQ people.

Religious leaders who supported Hell Houses believed that by scaring LGBTQ youth into “heterosexual” behavior they are saving their souls.

However, the message that “homosexuals” are going to hell can have a deleterious impact on our youth. But with Halloween flourishing as a gay cultural phenomenon our children, too, can joyfully go door-to-door trick-or-treating.

Our influence on culture is being acknowledged and celebrated more as we come out.

As Kwanzaa is a black holiday, and St. Patrick’s Day is an Irish holiday, maybe someday soon Halloween will be officially acknowledged as a gay holiday.

Happy Halloween!

But a historic yet bittersweet moment happened on October 8th in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

And the moment didn’t happen without a long and arduous struggle against the church’s ecclesiastical heterosexism.

After decades of open struggle with the church’s recalcitrant attitude and discrimination against its lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) worshippers who wanted to serve as pastors, elders or deacons, the Presbyterian Church (USA), known as the more liberal and tolerant branch of the denomination, finally conducted its first openly gay ordination.

In May of this year, Amendment 10-A was passed, meaning the majority of church’s 173 presbyteries ratified an amendment to its constitution (The Book of Order) that removes a provision prohibiting the ordination of sexually active unmarried Presbyterians as church officers. Before the passing of Amendment 10-A, the constitution required church officers to be celibate or married to a member of the opposite gender.

So on that Sunday of October 8th, many of us Presbyterians celebrated Scott Anderson’s ordination. Anderson served as co-Moderator of More Light Presbyterians, before moving to Madison to become the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches, and he also served as Executive Director of the California Council of Churches.

Scott stands on the shoulders of so many of my clergy brothers and sisters who were either defrock or flatly denied ordination because they were either opened about their sexual orientation or their local presbytery suspected they were LGBTQ.

As a church that is borne out of a liberal Protestant Christian tradition, the Presbyterian Church’s problem with its LGBTQ worshippers is a history of how it not only broke the backs and souls of the many who wanted to serve, but also how the church recklessly discarded the gifts we bring.

While homophobia is nothing new in the hallowed halls of most churches, the Presbyterian Church – with its 2.3 million members in all 50 states and Puerto Rico that are part of the Reformed family of Protestantism, descending from the branch of the Protestant Reformation begun by John Calvin – has been an embarrassment to itself.

And as a church that proudly touts itself as “reformed and always reforming,” when it came to all things LGBTQ prior to this recent Amendment, the church was not only losing its theological ground of being one that affirms diversity without divisiveness, it was also losing its public face of inclusion.

Wrestling with the issue of scriptural interpretation and faithfulness to the Bible, the Presbyterian Church at the 190th General Assembly in 1978 was unabashed with its homophobic renderings as it relates to LGBTQ worshippers stating, “The repentant homosexual person who finds God’s power to control his or her [sexual] desires can certainly be ordained, all other qualifications being met.”

LGBTQ worshippers had second-class status in the church, and it was maintained not only church policy that forbid us to serve as pastors, elders or deacons, but also by overriding decisions made by local parishes in support of inclusion of us within the body of the church.

However, before the Presbyterian Church finally abolished its ban on LGBTQ ministers, elders and deacons becoming ordained, many LGBTQ worshippers and allies over the years found ways to include LGBTQ members as church officers.

For example, “More Light Presbyterians” gave LGBTQ worshippers hope. It is a coalition of congregations and individuals in the American Presbyterian Church committed to increasing the involvement of all people in the church, regardless of sexuality.

More Light churches endorse the mission statement: “Following the risen Christ, and seeking to make the Church a true community of hospitality, the mission of More Light Presbyterians is the full participation of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people of faith in the life, ministry, and witness of the Presbyterian Church (USA).” These are the Presbyterians who truly uphold the church’s motto of being reformed and always reforming.

Other examples were the actions taken at General Assembly. The 210th General Assembly (GA) in 1998 reaffirmed that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) was committed “not to exclude anyone categorically in considering ordained service based on sexual orientation. And in 2003, the GA Permanent Judicial Commission reaffirmed that position when it said, “Sexual orientation alone is insufficient to make a person ineligible for ordination or installation.”

Why now, many ask, is the Presbyterian Church (USA) loosening its reins on LGBTQ worshippers?

Many within the Church speculate four possible factors:

•Some congregations have left the denomination – including large congregations in some presbyteries – thus changing the “balance” of voting in some presbyteries.
•Some Presbyterians and presbyteries “are ready to get past this argument, which has been going on since at least 1978.”
•American society has become more tolerant of same-gender relationships, evidenced, for instance, by a number of states legalizing same-sex marriage.
•“The wording of Amendment 10-A is more acceptable to more Presbyterians than previous proposals.”
In an “Open Letter to the Presbyterian Church (USA) from Archbishop Desmond Tutu,” he expressed the ultimate reason the church needed to abolish its discriminatory policy: justice!

“It is incumbent upon all of God’s children to speak out against injustice. It is sometimes equally important to speak in solidarity when justice has been done. For that reason I am writing to affirm my belief that in making room in your constitution for gay and lesbian Christians to be ordained as church leaders, you have accomplished an act of justice…”

Amen!