But lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) Americans — Christians and non-Christians — were not invited.

And you wouldn’t have known it from Gov. Rick Perry’sremarks:

“I’m so humbled to be in the midst of men and women who have answered the call to prayer and fast for our nation. …Like all of you, I love this country deeply, thank you all for being here.”

But the American Family Association (AFA), one of the largest and most influential traditional family values organizations in the country that has over two million online supporters, financed the event. This Tupelo, Mississippi-based Christian group has activity lobbied against the acceptance of LGBTQ Americans by publicly stating, “We oppose the homosexual movement’s efforts to convince our society that their behavior is normal.” The AFA unapologetically promotes the idea that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice that can be cured through religious teachings in ex-gay ministries. The organization focuses its anti-gay crusade primarily through television and other media, both nationally and abroad.

For example, in 2007, the AFA spoke out against IKEA for featuring lesbian and gay families in their television ads. In June 2008, the AFA protested a Heinz television ad, shown in the UK, for featuring two men kissing, and Heinz withdrew the ad. And in July 2008, the AFA boycotted of McDonald’s because McDonald’s had a director on its board from the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce.

But AFA wasn’t the only anti-LGBTQ organization at the rally. Representatives from Tony Perkins’s Family Research Council and Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family also attended.

Perry stated “The Response” wasn’t a disguised platform for his political aspiration to run for the presidency in 2012, but rather a simple Christian rally praying for all Americans, even Obama, during these difficult times.

“We pray for our nation’s leaders, Lord, for parents, for pastors, for the generals, for governors, that you would inspire them in these difficult times,” Perry told those gathered at Reliant Stadium. “Father, we pray for our President, that you would impart your wisdom upon him, that you would protect his family.”

However, I am confused about Perry’s role serving the American people. If Perry were a minister who had the backing of anti-gay organizations, I wouldn’t be so troubled. But Perry is a governor, whose oath to office is to represent not simply his evangelical conservative base, but rather every citizen in the Lone Star State.

Who would have ever thought that the hard earned gains that have been won to separate the church — an institution that summarily can and has excluded LGBT people — from the state — an institution that we have leverage to be included in — would once again be violated by an elected official, and a Texan no less?

Perry states if he considers a presidential run it will be done in part out of a religious calling. And no doubt, a calling to bow to the Christian Right.

And would we, LGBTQ Americans, not re-experience the Bush era?

Baby Bush (George Walker) unapologetically espoused a theocratic model for government to effect laws and government structures according to his Christian ideal — an ideal that never worked, on the best of his days in office — that egregiously violated the civil rights LGBTQ Americans.

Did I wish Bush had concealed his zeal as a born-again Christian? Not at all!

“Freedom of religion is a good thing. So is freedom from the religion others may wish to impose on those who differ,” wrote Charles Kimball, author of “When Religion Becomes Evil.”

American democracy suffers when people have to be closeted about their faith because it fosters a climate of religious intolerance. And while our Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, and not freedom from religion, it prohibits the establishment of a state religion. Bush, however, molded his presidency into that of a Christian church-state. And in so doing, his theistic imperative was solely to do the will of God and not the will of the American people.

And in so doing, Bush’s eliding of church and state boundaries diminished not only his political authority as a world leader that he so cherished, but it also diminishes one of the central objectives he wanted to obtain during his presidency — moral authority.

Perry’s rally positioned him as having moral authority, but he’s no friend to LGBTQ Americans. He opposes same-sex marriages, and he vehemently opposed the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lawrence vs. Texas, which struck down a Texas same-sex anti-sodomy law.

However, for Perry to have moral authority, he cannot as a governor call Americans to a Christian rally that by its invitation and sponsors exclude LGBT people, Jews, Muslims, Atheists, and many others. And he cannot impose his religious views into the fabric of American democracy.

To my surprise, I didn’t know — especially in 2011 — my sexual orientation was still up for debate. But on Aug. 1 on the “Morning Edition” of National Public Radio (NPR), it was. And the topic on the show that morning was “Can Therapy Help Change Sexual Orientation?”

“Today in Your Health, a controversy that is both political and personal. Conversion therapy is psychotherapy which aims to help gay men and women become straight. It’s hardly new, but it’s in the news again because the mental health clinic run by the husband of Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann reportedly provides such therapy,” Renee Montagne, host of “Morning Edition” stated.

My head spins at the thought of how Christian counseling services, like Dr. Marcus Bachmann’s, still get so much airtime, especially, in spite of the voluminous information disputing the pseudo-science of “ex-gay” conversion therapies.

Just three years ago, the American Psychological Association put out an official position paper stating: “The longstanding consensus of the behavioral and social sciences and the health and mental health professions is that homosexuality per se is a normal and positive variation of human sexual orientation.”

The negative health outcomes both emotional and psychological these “conversion” programs exact are untold and include depression, anxiety, self-destructive behavior, sexual dysfunction, avoidance of intimacy, loss of faith and spirituality, and the reinforcement of internalized homophobia and self-hatred, to name a few.

“It took really hard work to get my brain back and to recover from the emotional and psychological damage that I had experienced under that care,” Peterson Toscano, a theatrical performance activist, stated on NPR. Toscano spent 17 years in conversion therapies and faith-based ex-gay programs. Today he’s the co-founder of “Beyond Ex-Gay,” an online community to help ex-gay survivors.

However, there are still groups, usually motivated by religion-based homophobic therapies and ministries like Bachmann’s, who are hell-bent on the idea that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) Americans can and should be made straight.

These groups proselytize ex-gay rhetoric as both their Christian and patriotic duty.

For example, “Pray the Gay Away?,” an episode of the television series “Our America with Lisa Ling,” that aired on OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network on March 8 of this year, Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International, an ex-gay organization, spoke about his sure-fire remedy for us LGBTQ “prodigal” children, and how his organization can help us reconcile our faith, mend our sinful lives, and finally walk away from our supposedly wrong-headed “lifestyle” choice.

There are hordes of supposedly ex-gay “converts” who’ll be poster children for these conversion therapies. But truth be told, their conversions from being “homosexual” to “heterosexual” don’t “cure” their homosexual predilections, but rather these therapies attempt to put LGBTQ people on the road to outwardly live a straight life.

“It meant probably walking away from my religion, not having the wife and children of my future that I would expect, lots of shame and conflict with family and others. It was just devastating to contemplate,” Rich Wyler, who grew up in a Christian conservative family, stated on NPR.

But, the truth is that these “ex-gay” reparative therapies have a failure rate of 90 percent, and several “ex-gay” groups over the years have had to shut down when their leaders finally dealt with the reality of their own homosexuality.

Case in point: John Paulk, “ex-gay” poster boy, who appeared in HRC’s 2000 photo album with a one-word caption: “Gotcha!”

Wayne Besen, then the associate director of communications of the Human Rights Campaign, captured that Kodak moment as he snapped a picture of the then-37-year-old Paulk in a Washington D.C. gay bar. In the moment, pandemonium broke out in the bar, as the series of flashes from Besen’s camera were assumed by some to be those of a homophobe harassing a patron. But as Paulk hunched down trying to conceal his face, he learned that he could neither run nor hide. Paulk says he went into the bar just to use the bathroom — an unlikely story, as 40 minutes after entering the bar, he was still there, keeping company with both a drink and a fellow patron.

Paulk, a former drag queen known as Candi and a one-time first runner-up in the Miss Ingenue Pageant, is presently married to a self-proclaimed former lesbian who also underwent counseling in an “ex-gay” ministry run by Exodus International. Today, they both don the drag of being heterosexually married. They prominently graced the cover of “Newsweek” in August 1998, appeared on “60 Minutes” and “Oprah,” and wrote the book that gave Focus on the Family its name for its “ex-gay” conferences: “Love Won Out,” a memoir depicting the Paulks’ flight from gayhood.

“Conversion” therapies are a tool used by right-wing religious organizations to raise money and advocate against LGBTQ civil rights. And with this money these organizations are able to produce politically and religiously Biased Agenda-Driven (aptly abbreviated as “B.A.D.”) science like “reparative therapies,” attempting to justify them by presenting LGBTQ people as genetically flawed — a charge eerily reminiscent of the scientific racism and sexism that once undergirded treatment of blacks and women morally inferior due to supposed genetic flaws.

Fox New is no friend to the LGBTQ community. But now I’m wondering about NPR.

Of late, more lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people of color (POC) have not only begun vacationing in P-town, but we have also begun holding POC events.

For the past several years now, the “Women of Color Weekend” brings hundreds of us LBT sisters of color to P-town from all across the country.

And it is the one time of the year many of us make the journey to P-town, anticipating that we will feel safe enough, for a few days, to let down our guard.

But the sexual and homophobic harassment many of us LBT sisters endure from many of our heterosexual brothers of African descent back home in our communities, or imported from one of the Caribbean Islands has, too, become an inescapably reality at P-town.

“A few years back I sent a letter about this very subject…and I received an email from the Provincetown Chamber of Commerce, instructing me to get in touch with them and the police if this happens again…well, it has happened again and again,” Ife Franklin of Roxbury, MA wrote me.

Franklin and her wife were at “Women of Color Weekend 2011,” and she and several sisters of color were continually harassed.

“Now I will take ownership…I have not called the police or contacted the town Chamber.Why? Well, here is where this gets a little sticky for me…So, if I call and say ’there are some Black men harassing me’ will they round up ALL of the Black men? Even the ones that have done nothing wrong?”

Issues of race, gender identity, and sexual orientation trigger a particular type of violence against people of color that cannot afford to go unreported. Not reporting what is going on with LGBTQ people of color not only subjects us to constant violence that goes unchecked, but it also puts the larger queer culture at risk.

In the now defunct Boston LGBTQ newspaper In Newsweekly Will Coons in 2007 expressed in his “Letter to the Editor” his distress with the harassment. “I’m well aware of the white man’s burden and the need to be open and sensitive to historical injustices, but the flip side works as well: are these Jamaican men sensitive to, aware of, and respectful of the gay men who vacation here? My impression over the past ten years is that most of them are not and I distinctly feel uncomfortable in their presence.”

The lack of reporting about these types of harassment and assaults from LGBTQ people of color is for two reasons — both dealing with race.

The first reason is the “politics of silence” in LGBTQ communities of color to openly report these kinds of attacks unless it results in death. With being openly queer and often estranged if not alienated from our communities of color, reporting attacks against us by other people of color can make victims viewed as “race traitors.” And because of the “politics of silence” that run rampantly in our LGBTQ communities of color, we end up colluding in the violence against us.

The second reason has a lot to do with law enforcers, newspaper reporters, and doctors who view the topic of violence and people of color as synonymous.

Franklin wrote, “I feel that this harassment is a time bomb about to explode. At some point some man is going to take it to the next phase…my fear is that the ’cat calling’ will turn into groping…grabbing…rape, and/or death…Why? Because in their hearts we are just some ’batty gurls’ [Jamaican slang for homosexual].”

While Franklin’s fears are not unfounded, Jamaicans, however, are not the only ones harassing us.
Case in point is the murder of Shakia Gun of Newark, N.J.

On the morning of May 11, 2003, Shakia Gun, 15, was stabbed to death when she and her girlfriends rebuffed the sexual overtures of two African-American men by disclosing to them that their disinterest was simply because they were all lesbians.

Incensed that they had been rebuffed — and by lesbians no less — the two assailants reportedly jumped out of their car and got into a scuffle with the girls.

Stabbed by one of the men, Gun dropped to the ground and died shortly after arriving at University Hospital in Newark.

A groundbreaking study released in July 2010 titled “Black Lesbians Matter” examined the unique experiences, perspectives, and priorities of the Black LBT community.

This report reveals that LBT women of African descent are among the most vulnerable in our society and need advocacy in the areas of financial security, healthcare, access to education, marriage equality, and physical safety.

“Has there been ANY training or introduction for these ’workers’ educating them that they are in a mostly Gay culture? That the women…Black women or otherwise…are off limits,” Franklin asked.

In using cheap and oftentimes exploited laborers, the shops that line P-town’s main drag, Commercial Street, care little, if at all, about their workers’ cultural competency or our safety.

I have to agree with Coons when he wrote on 2007, “I can’t tell any local businesses how to run their operations. I can express my concerns, and I haven’t seen or heard of any overwhelming efforts to mitigate Jamaican male distain, distrust and disgust towards gays and lesbians.”

Sadly, it’s now 2011, and nothing has changed. The issue here is our safety — physically and mentally — and that of ALL LGBTQ tourists.

Provincetown’s Chamber of Commerce has a year before “Women of Color Weekend 2012.”

And the problem can be easily remedied: Either by educating these men or not hiring them at all. Or, we can take our gay dollars and go elsewhere.

By a vote of over 2,000 people, Gomes was nominated as one of Boston Pride’s 2011 Parade Marshals. At the 21st Annual Pride Breakfast in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, the Cambridge GLBT Commission and the Cambridge City Council celebrated the establishment and inaugural presentation of the Annual Bayard Rustin Civil Rights Award by awarding its first one to the late Rev. Peter J. Gomes.

Accepting the award on Gomes’ behalf were the dynamic married duo of Lowell House, and the first same-sex couple ever to be masters of one of the twelve undergraduate residences at Harvard, Professor Diana Eck and Rev. Dorothy Austin. Eck is Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard and Austin is Associate Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard and Chaplain to the University.

“The Reverend Professor would have been deeply honored to hear his name spoken in the same sentence with Bayard Rustin’s on the occasion of this award. He admired Rustin deeply. Peter would have said that he himself was a foot solider in the great arc of history,” Eck stated.

While Bayard Rustin (1912 – 1987) is most noted as the strategist and chief architect of the 1963 March on Washington that catapulted the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King onto a world stage, he also played a key role in helping King develop the strategy of nonviolence in the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955 – 1956), which successfully dismantled the long-standing Jim Crow ordinance of segregated seating on public transportation in Alabama.

And as the great humanitarian he was Rustin was not a one-issue man, because as the quintessential outsider — an African American man, a Quaker, a one-time pacifist, a political and social dissident, and a gay man, Rustin connected to the plight of all disenfranchised humans beings around the world.

Like Rustin, Rev. Peter Gomes, too, was the quintessential outsider — an African American man, Baptist preacher, gay, and a proud Republican who offered prayers at the inaugurations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Gomes became a Democrat when his former student, Deval Patrick, won as Massachusetts’ first black governor, and offered prayers at Deval’s first inauguration in 2007.

Also like Rustin, Gomes, an accidental gay advocate who told the “New York Times” he “came to abhor the label ’gay minister,’” advocated for LGBTQ rights at a time when it was both unsafe and unpopular.

In 1991 Gomes came out of the closet as a pre-emptive strike against a rabidly conservative Christian student group on campus whose magazine hurled homophobic diatribes against us lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer students and also wanted to remove Gomes from his position as the University minister.

“I now have an unambiguous vocation — a mission — to address the religious causes and roots of homophobia,” he told the Washington Postmonths later. “I will devote the rest of my life to addressing the ’religious case’ against gays.”

As a native son of Plymouth, Gomes’ primary interests were in early American religions, church music, Britain, and Elizabethan Puritanism. Descended from slaves, he nonetheless delighted in serving as trustee emeritus of the Pilgrim Society and celebrating his hometown’s Mayflower history, a distinctly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition.

One of the many things that will never be forgotten about Gomes is his melodious baritone voice and inimitable preaching style.

As one of his former head teaching fellow, I miss the sound of Peter’s voice; the things he said with that voice; and the choir that resounded within him with that voice. Described in “Harvard commencement and matriculation speeches and public addresses during the 1980s – 2010″ as “combining British RP (Received Pronunciation), family intonations, the tradition of Southern Baptist preaching, the educated diction of Harvard, his wit, and his mastery of alliteration and parallelism,” Peter’s oratory was unmatchable .

Austin jovially gave us a mimic sampling of Peter’s voice and the words he would convey if he were among us.”Dear people, you are good and you are so very good for your courage.”

Gomes knew how to be a friend. And he befriended you well. He was best man at Eck and Austin’s nuptials, and his friendships stretch across the globe.

In an email sent to Eck on March 1, the day after Gomes died, from renowned British author Karen Armstrong of “A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam,” she wrote, “A magnificent, archetypal life. Peter encapsulated so many of the conflicts that trouble our time and yet he preserved a sense of life’s pathos and its fun. I love him and cannot believe he has gone. It was my privilege to know him and feel that he was my friend.”

This Boston Pride we came out to honor Gomes’ friendship and spirit with which he showered us all.

The Breakfast was created by the AIDS Action Committee (AAC) to recognize the role that lesbians, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities of color play in ending the AIDS epidemic.

African-Americans and Latinos make up 12 percent of the population in Massachusetts, but account for 50 percent of people living with AIDS in the state. Research from the Centers for Disease Control has found that nearly one-third of young, gay black men in the United States are HIV-positive.

But were it not for this year’s Bayard Rustin Award Winner — our beloved Gary Bailey, an African American gay social worker, educator, and indefatigable mover and shaker in our community — along with a host of others, this Breakfast would not be in existence.

“Our first meeting was held at Club Cafe, which was fairly new then. We were all sitting on chairs lined around the room,” Bailey said. “I remember it very, very well. It was a rainy day and we were all working to make this event happen and it’s just amazing how big it’s become and that it’s over 20 years old.”

Going on its 22nd anniversary, the annual Breakfast is the time of the year the African American LGBTQ communities of Greater Boston come out of its New England winter of hibernation. The event brings together huge gatherings of our allies and community members in corporate worship and fellowship with one another.

Rebecca Haag, President and CEO of AIDS Action Committee stated, “As always, the Bayard Rustin Breakfast is one of my favorite events and provides me with the inspiration I need to make it through the next month and the incredible challenge of the AIDS Walk.”

The Breakfast affords many of us in our black LGBTQ communities a sweet moment — as unabashed people of faith and as unapologetic queers living with HIV/AIDS — in corporate worship and celebration of who we are in an inclusive and welcoming public space.

This year the Breakfast changed venue from the spacious John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston’s Columbia Point to the top floor in Hibernian Hall in Roxbury. Hibernian Hall was once the hub of social activity for Boston’s Irish community that now serves its African American community. Many worried the change of venue to a smaller space with limited seating might alter the usual tone and tenor of the event. But it didn’t. Rather, the change in venue squeezed us emotionally and physically closer to each other in our fight against HIV/AIDS.

And it was symbolically significant and brave that the Breakfast was held in one of Boston’s renowned black enclaves, perhaps signifying more acceptance of its LGBTQ community.

This year’s theme was “Beyond the Numbers: Our People, Our Challenge, Our Journey.” And for many in our community that are HIV-positive, their lives, stories, and voices are spiritual inspirations to us all.

“It has been 30 years since I was diagnosed with HIV and I’m still here. As I look back over these years I see all the good things God has done and feel blessed to have such a thriving life…full of hope that one day we will find a cure for the disease and a vaccine that can prevent new infections,” Joseth Minor-Hill, chair of the Bayard Rustin Community Breakfast Committee wrote as his opening statement.

The Breakfast’s keynote speaker and recipient of the Belynda A. Dunn Award of Recognition was Pernessa Seele, and she gave a rousing homily. Seele is CEO and founder of Balm in Gilead, Inc., a religious-based organization that provides support to people with AIDS and their families, in addition to working for prevention of HIV and AIDS.

Through Balm in Gilead, Seele helped engage nearly 10 million churchgoers on the issue of HIV and AIDS by starting the Harlem Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS, which brought together 50 leaders from Harlem’s Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and traditional faith communities to begin addressing AIDS in the Black community. Seele’s Harlem Week of Prayer inspired the creation of the Black Church Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS, which eventually became the National Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS, now celebrated globally.

Bailey’s work, like Seele’s, is both national and global. As the new president of the International Federation of Social Workers, a 750,000-member organization with representatives from more than 80 countries, Bailey help create a policy paper on HIV/AIDS to establish global standards on how social workers can help those impacted with and by the virus.

Bayard Rustin was a gay African American leader of the civil rights movement in the early sixties. He was one of the chief architects of the 1963 March on Washington and, from 1964 until his death in 1987, he headed the A. Phillip Randolph Institute for Racial Change. His belief in the inherent dignity of oppressed people and his vision of social change and social justice continues to inspire contemporary activists.

I think Rustin would be proud of Greater Boston’s black LGBTQ communities’ and our allies’ indefatigable work to stem the HIV/AIDS epidemic. We have a tradition of 22 years, in his name, of doing so.

As the only child of the world renowned pop duo Cher and Sonny Bono, many of us remember Chaz as their cherub-faced daughter Chastity, blowing kisses to the audience of her parents top-rated variety television show “Sonny & Cher.”

In 1995 Chaz was outed as a lesbian. But this time Chaz is in control, and on his own volition announcing he’s now legally a man.

But our trans men and women who have the courage to come out sadly and too often receive more criticism, sarcasm, and ridicule than praise.

For example, in New York Times reporter Cintra Wilson’s article “The Reluctant Transgender Role Model,” she attempts to comprehend the enormity of Chaz’s courage, and perhaps applaud his perseverance to undergo surgery. As a cisgendered person (one whose gender matches his or her biological sex) Wilson’s remark is, at best, insensitive and, at worst, insulting.

“You come away with a palpable understanding of how unendurably he must be suffering in his body to want to have his own sex characteristics amputated,” Wilson wrote.

And with the heterosexist assumption that the reason any child who is lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) might have something to do with inept parenting, Wilson ask these naggingly insulting questions in her article:

“Could it be possible that the fact that Chaz is now a man is somehow Cher’s fault? Did the toxic culture of celebrity damage Chastity/Chaz’s gender identity? Did Cher’s almost drag queen-like hyper-female persona somehow devour Chastity’s emerging femininity? Could Chaz’s transition have been motivated by gender-bent Oedipal revenge? Is he reclaiming the childhood attention his superstar mother always diverted? It is remotely possible that he needed to make the transition because his mom is Cher?”

“I don’t think the way I grew up had any effect on this issue,” Chaz told Wilson. “There’s a gender in your brain and a gender in your body. For 99 percent of people, those things are in alignment. For transgender people, they’re mismatched. That’s all it is. It’s not complicated, it’s not a neurosis. It’s a mix-up. It’s a birth defect, like a cleft palate.”

To no one’s surprise, social critic and self-described dissident feminist Camille Paglia, in a 54-second video by “Xtraonline” that went viral, had to volunteer her scurrilous viewpoint on Chaz’s choice to undergo gender reassignment as a form of bodily mutilation. Pagilia opines that Chaz’s unhappy and confusing childhood had nothing to do with him wanting a sex change, but she never states what Chaz’s unhappy and confusing childhood was about. Instead, Pagilia voices her worries. Pagilia’s biggest worry is that such an outrageous act of changing one’s gender would gravely influence children who feel born in the wrong body — an adolescent phase she disdainfully states she once experienced but overcame.

And when we see in the documentary Cher — gay icon nonpareil — not celebratory about Chaz’s transition as her close friends and girlfriend Jenny are, it’s unnerving. But Cher, in my opinion, comes across more as a frightened parent than as an insensitive transphobic. Worried about the toil it will take — physically and mentally — on Chaz to endure ongoing male hormone shots for the rest of his life, Cher, still using the female pronoun, states “I’m afraid she’s not going to be healthy, I’m afraid it’s too much for her.”

During the documentary, Cher is heard pining about what she perceives as the lost of her daughter forever when she stated she should have saved the familiar sound of Chaz’s voice on an answering machine before he began male hormone therapy.

But Cher understands Chaz’s courageous act to transition. “If I woke up tomorrow in the body of a man, I couldn’t get to the surgeon fast enough,” she stated in the documentary.

Chaz doesn’t walk away from the documentary without disturbingly turning a few heads in what many would agree are both sexists and misogynist remarks.

“Jenny and I had to relearn how to be together,” Chaz states in the film. “I never really understood women before, to be honest, but I had a tolerance for women that I don’t have now. …There is something in testosterone that makes talking and gossiping really grating. I’ve stopped talking as much. I’ve noticed that Jen can talk endlessly. …I just kind of zone out. I just don’t care!” Chaz laughs.

Unthinkingly, Chaz’s buys into the fallacious notion of “biology is destiny,” meaning we are slaves to our genes, and in his case hormones; he, also, is buying into the gender binary of male and female, which would categorically be dismissive of trans males and females.

“I’ve learned that the differences between men and women are so biological. I think if people realized that, it would be easier. I would be a great relationship counselor. I know the difference that hormones really make.”

Chaz isn’t realizing that espousing biological essentialist rhetoric, he’s categorizing people by a few fixed characteristics and not allowing for change or variation within God’s human tapestry. And I am troubled by these remarks.

However, I have to realize as a cisgendered lesbian, this is not my experience, and this is not my story. But rather I am reminded that the documentary “Becoming Chaz” is all about Chaz.

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.

Also, before any of us in the African American community flatly dismiss these assertions as part and parcel of a racist conspiratorial propaganda machine that is out to discredit our brother Malcolm, we need, at least, to hear these nagging claims.

And this time hear them coming from one of our own — Manning Marable, a renowned and respected African American historian and social critic from Columbia University.

Sadly, Marable died April 1, just days before the release of his magnum opus, an exhaustive and new 594-page biography “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” on April 4th, which also marks the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.

His assertions in the book — deriving from meticulously combing through 6,000 pages of F.B.I. files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, records from the Central Intelligence Agency, State Department and New York district attorney’s office, as well as his interviews with members of Malcolm X’s inner circle and security team — leaves the reader in shock and awe.

For those of us who always thought Malcolm X’s assassination, as with King’s, had everything to do with J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I, we are correct. Marable emphatically states that both the F.B.I and NYPD had advance knowledge of Malcolm X’s assassination plot, and did nothing to abort it.

But what will come as a shock is Marable’s assertions that the Malcolm X the world has come to know through Alex Haley’s 1965 “New York Times” bestseller “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and Spike Lee’s 1992 film “Malcolm X” based largely on Haley’s book is fictive. And the spin we have, in part, is due to Malcolm himself.

In creating an autobiographical narrative that would have his book fly off of bookshelves as well as elevate his status to a national — if not world — stage, Malcolm X intentionally fabricated, exaggerated, glossed over, and omitted vital facts about his life. One such fact omitted was his same-sex relationship with a white businessman.

The claim, no doubt, will become a hotly contested topic in sectors of the African American community. With an iconography of racist images of black masculinity ranging from back in the day as Sambos, Uncle Toms, coons, and bucks to now gangsta hip-hoppers, Malcolm represented the negation of them.

As a pop-culture hero to young black males of this generation and as the quintessential representation of black manhood of both America’s Black Civil Rights and Black Power eras, a gay Malcolm X will be a hard, if not impossible, sell to the African American community.

And here’s why:

At Malcolm X’s funeral, held at the Faith Temple Church Of God in February 27, 1965, Ossie Davis, renowned African American actor and civil rights activist, delivered the eulogy stating the following:

“Harlem has come to bid farewell to one of its brightest hopes. …Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. …And we will know him then for what he was and is. A prince. Our own black shining prince who didn’t hesitate to die because he loved us so.”

For a gangsta hip-hop generation Malcolm Little — before his conversion to the Nation of Islam and name change — represents for them a lauded hypermasculinity. And their male-dominated musical genre is aesthetically built on the most misogynistic and homophobic strains of Black Nationalism and afrocentricism.

But this claim by Marable, however, of Malcolm’s same-sex relationship is not new. Reports of Malcolm X’s queerness was first revealed in Bruce Perry’s 1991 biography, “Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America.”

According to Perry, Malcolm’s same-sex dalliances date back to childhood where he enjoyed being masturbated or fellated. In his 20s, Perry informs us, Malcolm had a sustained sexual relationship with a transvestite named Willie Mae, and also he had sex with gay men for money, boasting he serviced “queers.”

I am not heterosexist apologist, but if we, as LGBTQ, use this era of Malcolm’s life to claim him as gay, we misunderstand the art and survival of street hustling culture.

Similarly, if we, as African Americans, use this era of Malcolm’s life to dismiss that he engaged in same-sex relationships, many will miss the opportunity to purge ourselves of homophobic attitudes.

When Malcolm came to Boston to live with his older half-sister, Roxbury’s Ella Little Collins, he was 16, having dropped out of school at 15. With no job skills and looking for the most expedient route to acquire money, Malcolm peddled cocaine, broke into homes of Boston’s well-to-do, gambled big at poker games, and unabashedly serviced gay men for pay.

While it can be argued that Malcolm’s same-sex encounters were not solely financially motivated, let us also not dismiss that the only evidence we do have is the context in which he was.

The most recent one is titled Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India by Joseph Lelyveld.

And according to Lelyvard, Gandhi the pacifist was a wife-beater, denied sex to his wife for decades, was purported to be a “celibate” living life as an ascetic, but actually was a pedophile who ritualized sleeping naked with underage girls in order to test “the ferocity of his sexual desires,” and at one point left his wife for a male lover.

While one would think, at first glance, reading Lelyveld’s shockingly revelations about Gandhi, it’s all tabloid fodder for a rapacious audience that diets on sordid tales, Lelyveld, former editor of the “New York Times,” and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, pays meticulous attention to details.

Between 1908 and 1910, Gandhi left his wife to be with wealthy German-Jewish bodybuilder and architect Hermann Kallenbach. But the only evidence Lelyveld gives the reader, suggesting the bonding of the two men was at least homoerotic if not homosexual, is a salacious one-liner where Gandhi allegedly told Kallenback, “How completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance.” According to Gandhi’s own wife, Gandhi engaged in heterosexual intercourse, but it repulsed him so much it actually made him physically ill, and he vowed never to attempt it again.

While Gandhi may have been repulsed by heterosexuality he seems to be repulsed, at least publicly, by homosexuality, too. For example, in the 1930s, both Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru attempted to erase all traces of the Indian homoerotic tradition from Indian temples as a result of their systematic campaigns of “sexual cleansing.”

The revelation of Gandhi’s alleged bisexuality in Lelyveld’s book is the only positive news in a long laundry list of sexual peccadilloes, bizarre personal habits — like his love for enemas, done twice a day — mind-bending cult practices like “spiritual marriages” with women where sex is purportedly absent, and his unbelievable blatant racist attitudes towards black South Africans.

How did the public get so hoodwinked by the divinity of Gandhi?

The deification of Gandhi intentionally eclipsed Gandhi the real man. Elevated to a 20th century messiah by both European and American Christian clerics and missionaries, who wanted to covert Hindus to Christianity, and elevated to a 20th century Hindu god by Indians, Gandhi’s real life was overlooked and supplanted with a series religious myth. For example, John H. Holmes, a Unitarian pastor from New York, praised Gandhi in his writings and sermons with titles like “Gandhi: The Modern Christ” and “Mahatma Gandhi: The Greatest Man since Jesus Christ.” Krishnalal Shridharni announced that Gandhi was “The seventh reincarnation of Vishnu, Lord Rama.”

Known the world over as Mahatma Gandhi, Sanskrit for “Great Soul,” and as Bapu, Gujarati for “Father,” Gandhi comes to my conscious from the father of this country’s Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, who was also assassinated: Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And I loved Gandhi because King did.

Gandhi’s pacifist philosophy of “satyagraha,” a Sanskrit term he coined to mean the resistance to oppression through mass civil disobedience firmly rooted in “ahimsa” or absolute non-violence that transforms foes into friends, won India its independence from British colonialism in 1947. Gandhi’s liberation paradigm profoundly informed the socio-political theology of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, giving rise to a black non-violent movement consisting of sit-ins, freedom rides, and marches that shamefully exposed and evidently toppled the South’s Jim Crow ordinances.

As with King, Gandhi, too, became an iconic image in The Movement. However, if King and others knew of Gandhi’s racist views of black South Africans, and knew why Gandhi never met with African Americans civil rights leaders, who were hungry to not only meet the man but to know more about his philosophy of “satyagraha,” Gandhi wouldn’t have been so highly profiled in his public sermons.

But Gandhi was an unabashedly diehard supporter of India’s Hindu caste system, and would never mix with a lowly group or caste, and Lelyveld in Great Soul lays out Gandhi’s unedited views:

“We were then marched off to a prison intended for Kaffirs [offensive term equivalent to the n-word],” Gandhi complained during one of his campaigns for the rights of Indians settled there. “We could understand not being classed with whites, but to be placed on the same level as the Natives seemed too much to put up with. Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized — the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals.”

In an open letter to the legislature of South Africa’s Natal province, Gandhi wrote of how “the Indian is being dragged down to the position of the raw Kaffir” — someone, he later stated, “whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a number of cattle to buy a wife, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness.”

On white Afrikaners and Indians, he wrote: “We believe as much in the purity of races as we think they do.”

In a recent speech at a Virginia high school, President Obama stated that Gandhi was a “real hero of mine,” describing Gandhi as someone with whom he would like to dine. “He is somebody whom I find a lot of inspiration in. He inspired Dr. King.”

I’m sorry Mr. President, that wouldn’t happen, because Lelyveld’s Gandhi reveals a great soul the public didn’t know.

For LGBTQ African Americans, it’s the Black Church, and for LGBTQ Irish, it’s the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

St. Patrick’s Day has rolled around again, and like previous March 17 celebrations nationwide, its LGBTQ communities are not invited. As a contentious and protracted argument for now over two decades, parade officials have a difficult time grasping the notion that being Irish and gay is also part of their heritage.

Unlike the Black Church, however — that has and continues to throw the Bible at its LGBTQ community to justify their exclusionary practices — the St. Patrick’s Day parade committee uses the First Amendment, debating that they are constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of religion, speech and association, and the tenet separating church and state.

Whereas several cities and states are not gay-friendly, Boston is known to be. But to the surprised of its LGBTQ denizens, Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parades have no gay revelers marching.

In 1994 Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade was cancelled over this issue. The state’s highest court ruled that the parade organizers could not ban LGBTQ Irish-Americans from marching. But in a counter lawsuit, parade officials won, accusing LGBTQ Irish-Americans of violating their rights to free speech under the First Amendment.

Heterosexual Irish-Americans discriminating against their LGBTQ communities is so reminiscent, to me, of how straight African Americans discriminate against their queer communities, with both forgetting their similar struggles for acceptance.

In the not so distant past, Irish Americans were scoff at for showing their Irish pride, and they were discriminated against for being both Catholic and ethnically Irish. As they immigrated to these shores tension rose. By the mid-19th century anti-Irish bigotry was blatantly showcased throughout our cities as businesses put up placards saying: “No Irish Need Apply.” During the 1900s in New York City, for example, newsboys, found on every corner or on a regular newspaper route, were often children of immigrants, and fought fiercely with each other for these jobs. Italian and Jewish immigrant kids would mock Irish boys screaming, “No Irish need apply.” And the song “No Irish Need Apply” captured the daily hardship Irish Americans confronted looking for work:

“I’m a decent boy just landed
From the town of Ballyfad;
I want a situation, yes,
And want it very bad.
I have seen employment advertised,
“It’s just the thing,” says I,
“But the dirty spalpeen ended with
’No Irish Need Apply.’”

And like my ancestors of the African diaspora, the Irish were once enslaved, a.k.a. “Indentured Servants,” and bound for the Americas by the British. King James II and Charles I enslaved the Irish by selling 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves, making Ireland, as with Africa, and a huge source of human livestock. The forced interbreeding of Irish females with African males was widespread on British plantations in the Caribbean and U.S. until it was outlawed in 1681, giving birth to anti-miscegenation laws.

As a matter of fact, the Irish didn’t become “white” in America until they fully participated in the wave of anti-black violence that swept the country in the 1830s and 1840s, where unskilled Irish men competed with free African Americans for jobs.

So I ask, what would St. Patrick do in this situation?

He would unquestionably welcome Irish LGBTQ, especially in a parade named after him.

St. Patrick was a man who used his experience of struggle to effect change.

As a 5th century English missionary to Ireland, St. Patrick was born in 387 died on March 17, 461 AD. He was taken prisoner by a group of Irish raiders attacking his family’s estate that transported him to Ireland where he spent six years in captivity.

After six years as a prisoner, St. Patrick escaped, but returned to Ireland as a missionary to convert the Irish to Christianity. As a priest, he incorporated traditional Irish rituals rather than eradicating their native beliefs. St. Patrick used bonfires to celebrate Easter since the Irish honored their gods with fire, and he superimposed a sun, a powerful Irish symbol, onto the Christian cross to create what we now know as the Celtic cross.

While many parade officials may think they are honoring the St. Patrick’s Day tradition by excluding its LGBTQ communities, but like the Black Church, they will only be dishonoring themselves.

And, truth be told, no one knows how to throw a party or put on a parade like the LGBTQ community.