The film script follows the book closely and some of fans are apoplectic. The result is a tweeting tsunami of racist comments focusing on the presence of the few main black characters in the film.

Here are just a few of the racist tweets that have gone viral:

“why does rue have to be black not gonna lie kinda ruined the movie.”

“Kk call me racist but when I found out Rue was black her death wasn’t as sad.”

“why did the producer make all the good characters black.”

“Awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the little blonde innocent girl you pictured.”

Sadly, there are more vile tweets, some employing the “n-word,” that have been collected on a Tumblr page called Hunger Games Tweets.

Lionsgate, the distributor of The Hunger Games issued a statement praising fans who spoke out against the racist tweets, saying, “We applaud and support their action.”

Gay rights activist and actor George Hosato Takei who’s best known for his role as Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise in the television series Star Trek, responded to these racist tweets stating, “Some fans outraged that blacks cast in Hunger Games roles. Teens killing each other in futuristic arenas, and they care about what color?”

There are several salient themes both in the book and film, but race is not one of them. While I won’t say this dystopic tale is post-racial, the author’s, Suzanne Collins, treatment of race is both honest and nuanced.

In April of 2011, Suzanne Collins told Entertainment Weekly that her characters “…were not particularly intended to be biracial. It is a time period where hundreds of years have passed from now. There’s been a lot of ethnic mixing. But I think I describe them as having dark hair, grey eyes, and sort of olive skin. …But then there are some characters in the book who are more specifically described.”  Thresh and Rue. Collins said, “They’re African-American.”

And the characters Rue, Thresh, and Cinna are played in the film by African American actors, Amandla Stenberg, Dayo Okeniyi and Lenny Kravitz, respectively. Whereas Cinna’s skin hue is not mentioned in the book, Rue’s and Thresh’s are both explicitly depicted as having “dark skin.”

In describing the character Rue in the novel Collins writes, “And most hauntingly, a twelve-year-old girl from District 11. She has dark brown skin and eyes, but other than that, she’s very like Prim in size and demeanor.” Prim is the protagonist’s, Katniss Everdeen, sister. I surmise since Prim is white and Rue is being compared to her many fans expected the same, ignoring what’s stated explicitly in the text.

And in describing Thresh Collins writes, “The boy tribute from District 11, Thresh, has the same dark skin as Rue, but the resemblance stops there. He’s one of the giants, probably six and half feet tall and built like an ox. “

Collins could have never imagined this sort of reaction to her non-white characters, yet it highlights resoundingly the lack of cultural and ethnic diversity in children and young adult literature.

Data analyzed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center in 2010 found that only nine per cent of the three thousand four hundred children’s books published that year contained significant cultural or ethnic diversity.

With the paucity of cultural and ethnic diversity in children and young adult literature, white characters and white culture become an expectation and literary norm that is both learned and internalized by white children as well as children of color.

“People very often talk about literacy with words, but there’s such a thing as visual and thematic literacy,” says Deborah Pope, the executive director of the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation, which encourages diversity in kids’ books. “I think some of these young people just didn’t really read the book.”

While I agree with Pope that the fans who unabashedly expressed their racist views either didn’t read the book or didn’t read it carefully the theme and symbol of innocence and love in an inherently corrupt dystopic world affixed to a black 12-year old girl as Collins does with her character Rue in The Hunger Games is neither commonly nor comfortably seen in our world.

Do writers for children and young adult literature have a responsibility to be more explicit when introducing non-white characters in their books?

Or would being more explicit when introducing non-white characters play into a racist assumption that literary characters are white unless otherwise stated?

An easy answer would be to publish, to distribute, and to make part of core curriculum reading authors of color for children and young adults. Otherwise, this outpouring of racist tweets we see with The Hunger Games will merely be the tip of the iceberg.

The quick answer: The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act (mostly known by Matthew Shepard’s name). And this might be the only option the Florida Justice Department has in moving forward to arrest George Zimmerman and charge him with murder.

The nation is outraged that in 2012 an unarmed, African-American, 17 year-old high school student can be shot dead by a neighborhood watch captain because his egregious offense was   “walking while black” in a gated community.

By now you are familiar with the story—on February 26, Trayvon Martin left a 7-Eleven convenience store to head back home to his father’s fiancée’s gated community in the Retreat At Twin Lakes in Sanford, Florida. George Zimmerman, 28, of mixed ethnic descent (mother’s Peruvian, and father’s Jewish—he identifies as Hispanic)  began following Trayvon and called the Sanford Police Department. Although Zimmerman was advised by his superior not to pursue Trayvon he shot Trayvon in self- defense after a physical altercation initiated supposedly by Trayvon.

Was Zimmerman motivated by racism; therefore, racially profiling Trayvon?

And was Zimmerman’s act also a hate crime?

Many politicians are throwing around the h-word concerning Trayvon’s murder. Now many African-Americans are, too.

Renowned African American filmmaker Tyler Perry told CNN.com that “Racial profiling should be a hate crime investigated by the FBI. That way local government can’t make the decision on whether or not these people get punished.”

Perry recalled his frightening experience when he was pulled LAPD for making an illegal turn and having tinted windows. Once a black officer pulled up at the scene recognizing Perry. The arresting officers apologized and let him go. Perry stated that the incident, however, has stayed with him, opening his eyes to what type of treatment he might have endured if it wasn’t for his celebrity status.

In 2009, President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act in law.  Many African-Americans were irate that their protection under the law—which they argue they have fought for since being shipped to America in 1619—had to be associated with a white gay male who was killed in 1998.

Some African Americans, and, of course, heterosexual homophobes, wanted to know why couldn’t they have the James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act act solely to protect them. Many further argued that the law would serve to solely protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender and queer Americans and would do precious little to protect them, particularly since the bill is commonly referred to as the Matthew Shepard Act.

“The more time I spend in the LGBT community’s civil rights movement the more I’m struck by the need for all the various human communities to support one another…Trayvon’s death is as personal to me as any white lesbian’s death.  Trayvon is my brother, and whether one is black, white, gay or straight, we are all human beings together in this struggle for human dignity.  It’s as simple as that,” Carol Fischer, wrote me in an email. Fischer’s a white lesbian and producer of bloomingOUT, a weekly queer radio show on WFHB Radio Station in Bloomington, IN.

In 1998 both James Byrd Jr., and Matthew Shepard were victims of bias-motivated crimes. Byrd, an African American was murdered by three white supremacists who chained him to the back of their pick-up truck at his ankles and dragged along a three mile asphalt road until he was dismembered.  Shepard was tortured, tethered to a fence and left to die because he was gay.

With Florida’s Stand Your Ground permitting Zimmerman to walk without charges, the Shepard-Byrd statute not only reminds us of how bias-motivated crimes links gays and blacks together but that it’s also the best hope for Trayvon Martin and his family seeking justice.

This month around the country, LGBTQ communities are celebrating Bayard Rustin’s 100th birthday anniversary. Next month, AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts will have their annual Bayard Rustin Breakfast, and last month, the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association awarded “State of the Re:Union,” a nationally aired radio show distributed by NPR and PRX, first place in the Excellence in Radio category for the Black History Month special they did on Bayard Rustin, titled “Bayard Rustin: Who Is This Man?”

To date, he’s still largely unknown because of the heterosexism that has canonized the history of last century’s black civil rights movement.

Rustin was born March 17, 1912 in the Quaker-settled area of West Chester, Penn., one of the stops on the Underground Railroad. A handsome 6-footer who possessed both athletic and academic prowess, he is most noted as the strategist and chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington that catapulted the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King onto the world stage. Rustin also played a key role in helping King develop the strategy of nonviolence in the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956), which successfully dismantled the longstanding Jim Crow ordinance of segregated seating on public conveyances in Alabama.

One of my favorite Rustin quotations is this: “When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.” For LGBTQ African Americans, Rustin is the only open gay hero we have, and for many of us, his work and words give us courage to fight homophobia in ourselves and in our communities.

In a letter to a friend explaining his predilection toward gay sex, Rustin wrote:

“I must pray, trust, experience, dream, hope and all else possible until I know clearly in my own mind and spirit that I have failed [to become heterosexual], if I must fail, not because of a faint heart, or for lack of confidence in my true self, or for pride, or for emotional instability, or for moral lethargy, or any other character fault, but rather, because I come to see after the most complete searching that the best for me lies elsewhere.”

During the civil rights movement Bayard Rustin was always the man behind the scene, and a large part of that had to do with the fact that he was gay. As Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation of Teachers and friend of Rustin’s, stated in a review on Jervis Anderson’s biography “Bayard Rustin: The Troubles I’ve Seen,” Rustin “was the quintessential outsider — a black man, a Quaker, a one-time pacifist, a political, social dissident, and a homosexual.”

African-American ministers involved in the civil rights movement would have nothing to do with Rustin, and they intentionally spread rumors throughout the movement that King was gay because of his close friendship with Rustin.

In a spring 1987 interview with Rustin in “Open Hands,” a resource for ministries affirming the diversity of human sexuality, Rustin recalls that difficult period quite vividly:

“Martin Luther King, with whom I worked very closely, became very distressed when a number of the ministers working for him wanted him to dismiss me from his staff because of my homosexuality. Martin set up a committee to discover what he should do. They said that, despite the fact that I had contributed tremendously to the organization … they thought I should separate myself from Dr. King. This was the time when [Rev. Adam Clayton] Powell threatened to expose my so-called homosexual relationship with Dr. King.”

When Rustin pushed King to speak up on his behalf, King did not. In John D’Emilio’s book “Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin,” he writes the following on the matter:

Rustin offered to resign in the hope that his would force the issue. Much to his chagrin, King did not reject the offer. At the time, King was also involved in a major challenge to the conservative leadership of the National Baptist Convention, and one of his ministerial lieutenants in the fight was also gay.

“Basically King said I can’t take on two queers at on time,” one of Rustin’s associated recollected later.

When Rustin was asked about MLK’s views on gays in a March 1987 interview with Redvers Jean Marie, he stated, “It is difficult for me to know what Dr. King felt about gayness…”

As a March on Washington volunteer in 1963, Bayard Rustin was Eleanor Holmes Norton’s boss. The renowned Congresswoman of D.C. recalls the kerfuffle concerning Rustin’s sexuality. “I was sure the attacks would come because I knew what they could attack Bayard for,” Norton stated to Steve Hendrix in a 2011 interview. “It flared up and then flared right back down,” Norton stated. “Thank God, because there was no substitute for Bayard.”

The association of Rustin to the march was inseparable to those who worked closely with him. “The 53-year-old known at the time as ‘Mr. March-on-Washington’ was a lanky, cane-swinging, poetry-quoting black Quaker intellectual who wore his hair in a graying pompadour,” Hendrix wrote.

“When the anniversary comes around, frankly I think of Bayard as much as I think of King,” stated Norton. “King could hardly have given the speech if the march had not been so well attended and so well organized. If there had been any kind of disturbance, that would have been the story.”

Rustin was a complex man and often seemingly a contrarian. To the surprise of many, Rustin was an opponent to “identity politics” and most likely would not have been waving a rainbow flag or approve of queer studies departments at colleges and universities. To many conservative African Americans Rustin wasn’t only “queer” in the literal sense but was perceived also as one who didn’t have any of the approved and appropriate black sensibilities.

In the fall 1999 issue of “Quaker Studies,” Buzz Haughton wrote:

“Rustin’s steadfast opposition to identity politics also came under criticism by exponents of the developing Black Power movement. His critical stance toward affirmative action programs and black studies departments in American universities was not a popular viewpoint among many of his fellow Afro-Americans, and as at various other times of his life Rustin found himself to a certain extent isolated.”

As we comb through the annals of history, more of us are learning that Rustin was also one of the tallest trees in our forest.

Legal television commentator, Nancy Grace ignited a firestorm of criticism speculating Houston’s death might have been a homicide.

“I’d like to know who was around her, who, if anyone gave her drugs, following alcohol and drugs, and who let her slip, or pushed her, underneath that water,” Grace told CNN.

On Feb. 11 Houston was found dead in the bathtub of her Beverly Hilton Hotel room on the eve of the Grammy Awards.

But now Houston’s former sister-in-law, Bobby Brown’s sister Leolah Brown, is speaking up too.

“I believe Whitney’s death was not accidental,” Brown told the tabloid television news show “Access Hollywood.”

This new and disturbing allegation flies counter to the Coroner’s Office report that there was no sign of foul play or trauma—albeit the official cause of death won’t be determined until toxicology results are in.

While a murder investigation may well now ramp up the quest to ascertain who killed Houston, so too should a probe querying what killed her.

While family, friends, and fans blame Whitney’s colossal downfall on drugs and Boston’s R&B bad boy Bobby Brown, both functioned in helping Houston develop an approving black identity and an unquestioning sexuality.

What is now an adoring and all embracing black fan base of Houston was not always the case. In 1989, Houston was booed at the Soul Train Awards for supposedly “not being black enough.” It was at that same show that she met Bobby Brown.

“I have a theory about Whitney Houston,” said singer-actress Della Reese, a longtime Houston family friend. “I’ve been called ‘Uncle Tom,’ and I know how that feels. I think Whitney was so hurt by being called a ‘sellout’ and ‘acting white’—and crap like that—she wanted to change her image. What better way to do that than to marry a bad boy? And the drug abuse makes her a flawed person fighting to overcome her demons. Makes her relatable.”

Long before Houston’s former chauffeur, Al Bowman, told the tabloid television news show “Entertainment Tonight” in February that he witnessed Whitney and Bobby high on crack cocaine and in a threesome with an A-list soul singer in the back of his limo, rumours that Houston was a lesbian have been circulating for more than 30 years. And Houston’s personal assistant as well as best friend Robyn Crawford was rumored to have been Houston’s lesbian lover. For a while, the two women lived together.

“I met her when she was 16. It was at a summer job. …She had peachy colored skin and she didn’t look like anyone I’d ever met in East Orange, New Jersey,” Crawford in reminiscing about Houston told reporter Tom Junod in the February 2012 online issue of “Esquire Magazine.” “And we went around the world. I was her assistant and then her executive assistant and then her creative director. …I have never spoken about her until now. She was a loyal friend, and she knew I was never going to be disloyal to her. Now I can’t believe that I’m never going to hug her or hear her laughter again.”

Houston exhibiting gender non-conforming behavior was no secret to those closest around her. The “Daily Mail” reported that Houston’s sister-in-law, Tina Brown, and her ex-bodyguard, Kevin Ammons, both believed Houston my have been a lesbian because she “had wild sex sessions with women while out of her mind on crack cocaine.”

But it was her ex-spouse, bad boy Bobby Brown, who over time have come to believe Whitney married him with an ulterior motive.

“I believe her agenda was to clean up her image, while mine was to be loved and have children. The media was accusing her of having a bisexual relationship with her assistant, Robin [sic] Crawford. Since she was the American Sweetheart and all, that didn’t go too well with her image. …In Whitney’s situation, the only solution was to get married and have kids. That would kill all speculation, whether it was true or not,” Brown penned in his 2007 tell-all book “Bobby Brown: The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But… ”

The freest she may have been expressing her sexuality without being drugged out of her mind might have been in 1999 at the 13th Annual New York City Lesbian and Gay Pride Dance. Houston that year flew in for a special surprise guest appearance where she performed her then two most recent hits, “It’s Not right, But It’s Okay,” and “Heartbreak Hotel.”

The homophobic constraints of career and family expectations no doubt contribute to the stressors in Whitney’s “down low” life, but so, too, the church, even at her “home-going,” (funeral) service.

With homophobes like Pastor Donnie McClurkin, the poster boy for African American “ex-gay” ministries, and gospel singers Angie and Debbie Winans, who released a single in 1998 titled “Not Natural,” in which they self-righteously denounced lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) people, to name a few, singing Whitney farewell only a “down low” existence was possible for her.

We may never know all the demons that took this internationally renown pop star diva down a torturous and troubling road of self destruction, but one demon not mentioned is homophobia.

Tulane University Professor Melissa Harris-Perry, the author of an upcoming book on racial stereotypes, summed up my feelings best when she told MSNBC that “what killed me was that in 2011, Viola Davis was reduced to playing a maid.”

Earlier during the Academy Awards ceremony Octavia Spencer won best supporting actress for her stereotypical role as the sassy, tart-tongued “mammy-fied” maid, Minny Jackson, in “The Help,” making Spencer the fifth African American women to receive the coveted Oscar, and the second sister portraying a maid.

Sixty-two years earlier, in 1940, in Jim Crow America, Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Oscar, and for her supporting role as a maid called “Mammy” in “Gone With the Wind.” When civil rights groups, like the NAACP, criticized McDaniel for her portrayal as “Mammy,” McDaniel famously retorted, “I would rather get paid $700 a week for playing a maid than $7 for being one.”

Knowing of the controversial legacy stemming from McDaniel’s role, Davis told “Fresh Air’s” Terry Gross her “role of Aibileen, in the hands of the wrong actress, could turn into a cliché. …You’re only reduced to a cliché if you don’t humanize a character. A character can’t be a stereotype based on the character’s occupation.” Davis contest she gave depth and dimensionality to her character by pulling from the actually lived experiences of both her mother and grandmother, who worked as maids.

Spencer, too, had trepidations about portraying a maid, telling reporters that her mother was a maid in Alabama, and “her heart sank when Stockett gave her the manuscript to read, worried that she might appear as a character like Mammy from “Gone With the Wind.” ‘And then I read it and I couldn’t stop reading it. It was brilliant.’”

In this “post-racial” Obama era, the subject of race and the politics of black representation in films are constrained by neither political correctness, personal enlightenment, nor moral consciousness.

For example, in 2010 the historical legacy of the devaluation and demonization of black motherhood was both applauded and rewarded at that year’s Oscars. And the point was clearly illustrated with Mo’Nique, capturing the gold statue for best supporting actress in the movie Precious, based on the novel “Push” by Sapphire, as a ghetto welfare mom who demeans and demoralizes her child every chance she can.

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

But the images of African-American parenting have historically been viewed through a prism of gendered and racial stereotypes. And the image of Mo’Nique as the “bad black mother” and Sandra Bullock as “good white mother” is nothing new. The images of the “bad black mother” have not only been used for entertainment purposes but also used for legislating welfare policy reforms.

With international stars like Iman, Oprah, Whoopi Goldberg, and Beyonce, to name a few, signaling that women of the African diaspora have come a long way, what’s up with Hollywood’s—and much of white America’s—fixation of us as their maids and welfare moms?

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

In a skit imagining what actors are thinking, Oscar host Billy Crystal said the following referring to Davis: “I want to thank my writer and director for creating the role of a strong black woman that wasn’t played by Tyler Perry. …When I came out of ‘The Help’ I wanted to hug the first black woman that I saw, which from Beverly Hills is a 45-minute drive.”

The iconography of black women is predicated on four racist cultural images: the Jezebel, the Sapphire, Aunt Jemima, and Mammy. With the image of the strong black women who can endure anything and “make a way out of no way,” her strength is either demonized as being emasculating of black men or impervious to the human condition. The Aunt Jemima and Mammy stereotypes are now conflated into what’s called “Big Mamma” in today’s present iconography of racist and sexist images of African-American women.

While the Aunt Jemima and Mammy stereotypes are prevalent images that derive from slavery, for centuries both of them have not only been threatening, comforting, and nurturing to white culture but also to African-American men like Tyler Perry’s “Medea.” The dominant culture doesn’t see and hear African American women voices on this issue because our humanity is distorted and made invisible through a prism of racist and sexist stereotypes. So too is our suffering.

And our suffering is exacerbated when black women’s stories are told and/or scripted through a universally popular feel good but nonetheless racist trope of the white hero/rescuer.

This trope principally conveys the following: black liberation comes about through white agency.

While white guilt and paternalism are clearly pawned off in this trope as compassion, so too is its accompanying fictive narrative about black people.

And given our unresolved and embarrassing history of race relations in this country, only such a trope as the white hero/rescuer could be believed and made in America.

“Without an understanding of the deep hurt that Black men have around issues of masculinity and their role as a man, you can’t hope to eliminate anti-homosexual sentiment in Black men,” Manago wrote in his recent article “Getting at the Root of Black ‘Homophobic’ Speech,” in which he castigates GLAAD for demanding that CNN fire Roland Martin for misconstrued homophobic tweets. “There has been no national project to address the psychic damage that White supremacy has done to Black men. But there is always some predominantly White institution waiting, ready to pounce on a Black man for behaving badly.”

Unapologetically Afrocentric in his approach in addressing social, mental, and health issues plaguing communities of black men, Manago has created a national study on black men (the Critical Thinking and Cultural Affirmation (CTCA) study) and has built two organizations that, for more than two decades, have had national recognition and have successfully secured millions of dollars in funding: AmASSI Health and Cultural Centers, and Black Men’s Xchange (BMX).

Manago’s CTCA study is a culturally informed, preventive health strategy that addresses positive mental, sexual, and community health, encouraging self-actualization, cultural empowerment, and responsibility. CTCA has been in practice since 2002.

As the founder and CEO of AmASSI Health and Cultural Centers, Manago was one of the first innovators in the AIDS movement to provide HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention services utilizing a psychosocial, mental health model that was culturally specific to the African-American identity. AmASSI has been in practice since 1989.

Manago is the national organizer and founder of Black Men’s Xchange, the oldest and largest community-based movement devoted to promoting healthy self-concept and behavior, cultural affirmation, and critical consciousness among SGL, bisexual, and transgender males and their allies, with chapters in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, Sacramento, Orange County, Detroit, Denver, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Black Men’s Xchange has been funded by the Center for Disease Control’s Act Against AIDS Leadership Initiative program. And the CDC positions BMX alongside other legacy community black organization such as the NAACP, the Urban League, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and American Urban Radio Networks. BMX has been in practice since 1989.

A native of south-central Los Angeles, Manago began a vocation in social services at the age of 16. While many would call him a social activist, he does not like the term “activist” applied to him, because he considers black LGBTQ activism tethered to mainstream white privilege, ideology, and single-focused gay organizations, which he views as culturally dissonant and too limited in scope to be meaningful and beneficial to African-American LGBTQ communities and the larger black community.

To many in Manago’s community and beyond, he’s an unsung hero greatly misunderstood and intentionally marginalized by LGBTQ power brokers. Manago would contest that one factor contributing to his marginalization was the debacle between him and Keith Boykin during the 10th anniversary of the Million Man March. In commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Million Man March, the Nation of Islam (NOI) decidedly chose one LGBTQ organization over another, and that decision highlights much of the political, class, and ideological differences in the African-American LGBTQ community at large. Keith Boykin, the founder and then-president of the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC), an African-American LGBTQ civil rights organization of which I was then a board member, was dropped from the event, but Cleo Manago was not. Both men had much to bring to the 2005 Millions More March, but Manago mirrored the fundamental sentiment of Farrakhan’s theology — a conscious separation from the dominant, white heterosexual and queer cultures — and he’d spoken at the historic 1995 Million Man March. In an open letter Manago emailed around in 2005:

“BMX knows the Nation of Islam (NOI). It’s an independent black organization not funded by the HRC or any white folks. The NOI does not, nor does it have to succumb to White gay press laden, black homosexual coercives who want to ram a white constructed gay-identity political agenda — that even most Black homosexuals reject — down their throats. Over the years, several members of the Nation of Islam have been to BMX. As some of you may know, almost 10 years ago BMX co-sponsored a very successful transformative debate on Homosexuality in the Black community with the Nation in L.A.”
As a queer separatist organization, many LGBTQ African Americans applaud BMX for being unabashedly queer and unapologetically black. But the terms “queer” and “gay” are not descriptors Manago and his organization would use to depict themselves. That would be “same-gender-loving,” because terms like “gay” and “queer” uphold a white queer hegemony that Manago and many in the African-American LGBTQ community denounce. As a matter of fact, he takes credit for having coined the terms “men who have sex with men” (MSM) and “same-gender-loving” (SGL).

To some in the LGBTQ community, Manago is a dangerous demagogue. But to tens of thousands African-American brothers and generous funders, he’s seen as a brother driven with a dream. And he’s perhaps dangerous because he’s effecting change.

The one institution least expected to be lauded among LGBTQ people of African descent in the month-long celebration is the Black Church.

In this ongoing cacophony of anti-gay rhetoric from fire and brimstone, bible-thumping ministers are those courageous few who not only reminisce about their march with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King during the 1960s civil rights movement, but those who also continue to uphold the message of King’s social gospel by fighting for LGBTQ civil rights.

Too often we hear African American ministers espouse they are fierce proponents of LGBTQ social justice issues but are stymied by their parishioners and church polity.

Not all churches, however, allow homophobic churchgoers or ecclesial powers to stand in the way.

Union United Methodist Church (UUMC), a predominately African American congregation, located in Boston’s South End—the epicenter of the city’s LGBTQ community—is one of them.

When Hilda Evans, a parishioner of UUMC, suggested in 1996 the church open its doors to the entire Boston South End community, four later years, later it did. And on Feb. 15, 2000 Union United Methodist Church, led by the now retired Rev. Theodore L. Lockhart, became the nation’s first African American Methodist and denominational church to officially become “reconciling and inclusive” church.

Union’s church council adopted an unanimous resolution to enthusiastically welcome LGBTQ worshippers along with a statement announcing that UUMC “…affirm[s] the full participation in all aspects of our church life of all who confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, regardless of their race, color, physical challenge, sexual orientation and/or affectional orientation.”

“The vote by Union United Methodist Church shows that even within the more strict religious institutions there is a diversity of opinions on gay and lesbian issues,” said Donna Payne in 2000, the then-HRC field organizer, working with people of color and the religious community. “Religious views on homosexuality are not monolithic, and people of faith are increasingly speaking out in favor of full-inclusion for gay and lesbians worshipers in churches, synagogues, and mosques throughout America.”

McLee had hoped UUMC would serve as an example for other black churches on how to talk to the black community about homosexuality.

“We need to have a serious conversation about sexuality in our community,” McLee told Boston’s black own newspaper, the “Bay State Banner” in 2002. “If we continue to marginalize our gay brothers and sisters, we are going to isolate them. It’s not holy.”

Whereas most black churches, locally and nationally, are silent and/or inactive on the HIV/AID epidemic ravaging their communities, UUMC continues to be an ally to this community.

For example, before she died of AIDS, community activist Belynda Dunn, 49, brought frank talks about AIDS to the black church. And she did it first at UUMC.

“Belynda really lit a fire under me. …That’s what Belynda did with everyone. She really helped us cross ideological lines and theological lines and not get hung up on the homosexual issue. She said to the black church: ‘Get over it,’” her pastor, then-Reverend Martin McLee said.

UUMC was the first black church, and to date the only, to host Boston’s Annual Gay Pride Interfaith Prayer service, and to have a “Happy Pride” sign posted in front of the church.

“Gay folk have always been in the black church and the white church—that’s not new—but we don’t require folk to pretend that they’re not who they are,” Rev. Martin D. McLee told the “Boston Globe” in 2008, who served UUMC for eight years.

Since the church became “reconciling and inclusive” the congregation has hosted a gospel brunch after Sunday worship during Pride weekend for the African American community.

McLee has left UUMC, but the fight for LGBTQ civil rights continues on now with the Rev. LaTrelle Miller Easterling, the first female pastor in the church’s 190-year history.

In June 2011 more than 100 Methodist ministers in New England have pledged to marry gay couples in defiance of the denomination’s ban on same-sex unions.

Approximately 1 out of 9 Methodist clerics signed a statement pledging to open their churches to LGBTQ couples that stated, “We repent that it has taken us so long to act. …We realize that our church’s discriminatory policies tarnish the witness of the church to the world, and we are [complicit].”

The Rev. Easterling signed the statement, saying she could not in good conscience deny a practicing member of her church her marriage blessing because the person is gay.

“We’re laying on the line our ordination that many of us have worked four to eight years to get, as well as the expense and time of the seminary,” Easterling told the “Globe.” “I certainly stand by this movement.”

UUMC is a movement, and it’s an example not just regional to black churches in Boston.

This February 1 the International Civil Rights Center and Museum (ICRCM) opened in Greensboro, North Carolina, honoring the courageous action of four African- American students. Their actions led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which mandated desegregation of all public accommodations.

Fifty years ago on February 1,1960 the now ICRCM was a Woolworth’s store and the site of the original sit-in where Ezell A. Blair Jr. (also known as Jibreel Khazan), David Leinhail Richmond, Joseph Alfred McNeil, and Franklin Eugene McCain from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College (NC A&T), a historically black college, sat at its lunch counter as a form of non-violent direct action protesting the store’s segregated seating policy. And as a result of their civil disobedience, sit-ins sprung up not only in Greensboro but throughout the South, challenging other forms of this nation’s segregated public accommodations, including bathrooms, water fountains, parks, theaters, and swimming pools, to name a few.

If Dr. Carter Woodson, the Father of Black History, were alive today, he would be proud that the ICRCM opened this month.

However, for a younger generation of African- Americans as well as whites, whose ballots help elect this country’s first African-American president, celebrating Black History Month seems outdated.

“Obama is post-racial. And Black History Month is old school,” Josh Dawson (26) of New Hampshire tells me.

For many whites as well as people of color of Dawson’s generation, Obama’s race was a “non-issue.” And Obama’s election encapsulated for them both the physical and symbolic representation of Martin Luther Kings’ vision uttered in his historic ” I Have a Dream” during the 1963 March on Washington.

“King said don’t judge by the color of our skin, but instead the content of our character,” Dawson continues.

In proving how “post-racial” Obama was as a presidential candidate, Michael Crowley of the New Republic wrote in his article “Post-Racial” that it wasn’t only liberals who had no problem with Obama’s race, but that conservatives had no problem too, even the infamous ex-Klansman David Duke.

“Even white Supremacists don’t hate Obama,” Crowley writes about Duke. “[Duke] seems almost nonchalant about Obama, don’t see much difference in Barack Obama than Hillary Clinton — or, for that matter, John McCain.”

For years, the celebration of Black History Month has always brought up the ire around “identity politics” and “special rights.”

‘If we’re gonna have Black History Month, why not White History Month? Italian History Month? Chinese History Month?,” Dawson questions.

During the George W. Bush years we saw the waning interest in “identity politics,” creating both political and systematic disempowerment of marginalized groups, like people of color, women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people. We also saw the gradual dismantling of affirmative action policies, like in 2003 when the Supreme Court split the difference on affirmative action, allowing the Bakke case on reverse discrimination to stand.

In celebrating Black History Month this year, in what is now perceived by some to be one year into the “post-racial” era since Obama took office, I worry how we as a nation will honestly talk about race.

For example, during Black History Month in 2009 Holder received scathing criticism for his speech on race. His critics said the tone and tenor of the speech was confrontational and accusatory.

“Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot,” Holder said, “in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.”

Within the African- American LGBTQ community, Black History Month has always come under criticism. And rightly so! The absence of LGBTQ people of African descent in the month-long celebration is evidence of how race, gender and sexual politics of the dominant culture are reinscribed in black culture as well. It leads you to believe that the only shakers and movers in the history of people of African descent in the U.S. were and still are heterosexuals. And because of this heterosexist bias, the sheroes and heroes of LGBTQ people of African decent — like Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam, and Bayard Rustin — are mostly known and lauded within a subculture of black life.

However, the argument that celebrating Black History Month in 2010 is no more than a celebration of a relic tethered to an old defunct paradigm of the civil rights era and is a hindrance to black people moving forward is bogus.

In order to move forward you must look back.

And in so doing, were it not for the successful sit-ins, marches, and boycotts of the 1960′s, could we have this conversation in 2012?

Champion was an unusual student to attend Florida A&M University (FAMU), one of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and become a drum major: he was openly gay, and at HBCUs drum majors are usually heterosexual macho brothers, equivalent to the captains of football teams. Nevertheless, he was slated to be the head drum major next school year.

On Nov. 19, 2011 Champion, a music major from Atlanta, was one of six drum majors from FAMU’s famous “Marching 100″ band who traveled to Orlando for the annual Florida Classic football game between FAMU and Bethune-Cookman University. At the end of the game that evening, Champion was found dead aboard a band bus, having suffered blunt trauma blows from flogging. Thirteen band members, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, each independently stated to police that Champion was forced onto a band bus with a reputation for hazing.

Law enforcement and the medical examiner ruled Champion’s death a homicide. But rumors that he was singled out because of his sexual orientation forces HBCUs to once again examine their institutional heterosexism, along with their students’ individual and group activities of anti-gay violence.

Morehouse’s highly publicized 2002 gay-bashing incident has apparently taught HBCUs very little in terms of developing safe, nurturing, and culturally competent schools with support services for their LGBTQ students, faculty, and administrators. On Nov. 4, 2002 a Morehouse College student sustained a fractured skull from his classmate, sophomore Aaron Price, the son of a minister, not surprisingly. Price uncontrollably beat his victim on the head with a baseball bat for allegedly looking at him in the shower. Throughout the 1990s Morehouse was listed on the Princeton Review’s top 20 homophobic campuses.

In 2012 HBCUs as a whole are still slow to take on the public challenge on LGBTQ issues, for a few reasons: some schools were founded with conservative religious affiliation, and black colleges are no different from African-American communities in general, which is why the suggestion by some in the FAMU community that Champion’s death was about his being gay is creating a mountain out of a molehill.

“Um, who cares? Unless his sexual orientation was the reason why he was beaten to death, then it’s quite irrelevant,” wrote HinterlandGazette.com. “We had previously heard about him being gay, but we declined on reporting about it because if the police were told this when they characterized his death a result of hazing and didn’t connect the two to say this was a hate crime, then why throw it out there? I’m sure Robert Champion wasn’t the first homosexual to pledge a fraternity.”

No one in the FAMU community wants to broach the topic of Champion’s sexual orientation as a possible motivating factor for the incident. And the pushback from students and administration is fierce.

Whereas an institutional shift at FAMU needs to take place, embracing an inclusive acceptance of its students’ various sexual orientations and gender identities, FAMU will work indefatigably to ward off lawsuits. (The Champions cannot sue FAMU for six months because of the state institution is protected under a sovereign immunity.)

In an anemic attempt to exonerate FAMU band director, Dr. Julian White, of any culpability concerning Champion’s death, Chuck Hobbs, his attorney, released a statement that reveals both ignorance about anti-gay violence as well as no desire to change the culture that brought about Champion’s murder:

“Assuming that the assertions of the Champion family and their attorney Chris Chestnut are true, then it is entirely possible that Champion’s tragic death was less about any ritualistic hazing and more tantamount to a hateful and fully conscious attempt to batter a young man because of his sexual orientation. As such, the efforts Dr. White expended to root out and report hazing could not have predicted or prevented such deliberate barbarity.”
We may never know if Champion’s beat-down from “hazing” was an accidental homicide or an intended hate crime. But these are the facts we know presently: Champion was forced onto a band bus with a reputation for hazing; he was a vocal opponent against hazing, and he was a band disciplinarian, slated to be head drum major; and he had an “alternative lifestyle.” Everyone in the FAMU community is willing to talk about all these issues except about him being gay.

Too many people think King’s statements regarding justice are only about race and the African-American community, thus excluding the LGBTQ community. But King said, “[T]he revolution for human rights is opening up unhealthy areas in American life and permitting a new and wholesome healing to take place. Eventually the civil rights movement will have contributed infinitely more to the nation than the eradication of racial justice.”

Members of King’s family also embrace his words, extending them to the LGBTQ community. For example, in 1998, Coretta Scott King addressed the LGBT group Lambda Legal in Chicago. In her speech, she said queer rights and civil rights were the same: “I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King’s dream to make room at the table of brother and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.”

Like her parents’ faith, the Kings’ eldest daughter Yolanda’s faith in the civil rights movement drove her passion for LGBTQ justice. “If you are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, you do not have the same rights as other Americans,” she said at Chicago’s Out & Equal Workplace Summit in 2006. “You cannot marry. … [Y]ou still face discrimination in the workplace, and in our armed forces. For a nation that prides itself on liberty, justice and equality for all, this is totally unacceptable.”

However, I must say that as an African-American minister having pastored churches, and having worked alongside black ministers and their parishioners, I have learned that whom we shout out and pray to on Sunday as an oppressed people does not have any relation to whom we damn, discard, and demonize, thus making us an oppressor to people marginalized and disenfranchised like ourselves. The black church is an unabashed and unapologetic oppressor of its LGBTQ community and, consequently, a hindrance in progressive movement toward LGBTQ civil rights in this country.

While King would undoubtedly shake his head in disbelief concerning his brethren, he would applaud the stance the NAACP took on marriage equality. In quelling the tension between black civil right activists and ministers of the 1960s who still vociferously state that marriage equality for LGBTQ Americans is not a civil right, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. marked the 40th anniversary of “Loving v. Virginia” (when the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967 struck down this country’s anti-miscegenation laws as unconstitutional) by stating the following concerning same-sex marriage:

“It is undeniable that the experience of African Americans differs in many important ways from that of gay men and lesbians; among other things, the legacy of slavery and segregation is profound. But differences in historical experiences should not preclude the application of constitutional provisions to gay men and lesbians who are denied the fight to marry the person of their choice.”
But if King were with us today, he would be sad about how homophobia continues within the black church community, which has a profound impact on the mistreatment of its LGBTQ community, and its inattentiveness to the AIDS epidemic ravaging the black community.

Religion has become a peculiar institution in the theater of human life. Just as the Latin root of the word, “religio,” means “to bind,” it has served as a legitimate power in binding people’s shared hatred. But King’s teachings taught me how religion plays a profound role in the work of justice. A religion that looks at reality from an involved, committed stance in light of a faith that does justice sees the face of the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the dispossessed — and that also includes its LGBTQ people.

As a religion columnist, I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against LGBTQ people. Because homophobia is both a hatred of the “other” and is usually acted upon “in the name of religion,” by reporting religion in the news, I aim to highlight how religious intolerance and fundamentalism not only shatters the goal of American democracy but aids in perpetuating other forms of oppression, such as racism, sexism, classism, and anti-Semitism.

I miss the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I miss the sound of his voice, the things he said with his voice. I miss the choir that resounded within him with his voice. In keeping his dream alive, we must continue to lift our voices. We must speak our truth to power. And those of us who live on the margin must speak out, because our survival as LGBTQ worshippers in our faith communities is predicated upon our voices being lifted.

Each year, I mark the MLK holiday by reexamining King’s teachings, remembering that my longing for LGBTQ justice is inextricably tied to my work toward religious tolerance in the black church.

And this is why I continue to speak up.