Commenter ‘Crystal‘ says:

The comments which compare LGBT community’s struggle to civil rights for Blacks, are deplorable and a slap in my face as a black woman. The LGBT struggle doesn’t compare in any way shape or form to the struggle for black civil rights. If you do not believe me, you need to invest in a lot of literature addressing the history of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade and the Civil Rights Movement. My skin color can NEVER change. It is apparent when I first walk into a room full of my white colleagues and peers. I do not have White Privilege or protection for my protection and can never “pass” for white. There are many blacks who are like me, and there were much more during the civil rights movement. Btw, there is a great article on Yahoo about a white father raising his bi-racial son and he discusses the things that he will never experience as a white man, yet his son will. Check it out because it illustrates, in a nutshell, why the struggle of gay persons and black persons, are not the same. Being gay is not something that is always noticeable or apparent, even in so called effeminate men or masculine women. Granted some people can pass for white, but that is not common to all black people as many of us simply cannot. Some effeminate men may look like and dress as women and more masculine women may dress as and look like men. However, all gay men and women are not transgender or transsexual, who admittedly, are a group of people that still face a lot of discrimination in terms of employment and housing and are historically relegated to finding jobs and housing in certain areas. The fact that many gay people and advocates choose to not accept this and ignore this is ignorant and shameful. How dare you compare civil rights struggle of blacks of to that of gay rights. Homosexuals have NEVER been subjected the terror that scores of blacks faced in terms of the lynchings, brutal beatings, maimings, and unjustified killings that blacks endured during slavery and after. And guess what blacks are still experiencing a modern day form of slavery and racism, known as institutional slavery. This fact evidences that one’s supposed sexual identity based on outward or physical appearance is something that CAN be changed if necessary. You CAN blend and appear straight although you may not be because many times a gay person’s outward appearance (the way they dress and talk, etc.) is the same as a straight person. Most black people can NEVER do that. BTW, in case some commenters missed it, the Morehouse football team were cheering at a racist man beating a gay man who planted an unwanted kiss on him. Not at the fact that a black man was being beaten. The only thing the football team saw was that the man was gay. The team did not see color. Yet, the OP is incensed by the fact that the football team were not aware and disturbed that it was a gay man being beaten?! Why would they? This is what some of the commenters are calling out. In their view, the struggle of straight black people during slavery and civil rights is inherently different than theirs. And I get that. My issue with the blog, is that I wonder what would the OP have preferred instead? That the team yelled racial slurs and showed their outrage at the beating by antagonizing any white person, like herself, viewing the movie or crossing their paths once the movie ended? I don’t get what she want or expect them to do. Arguing with folks about why they are so wrong about homosexuality is almost like me arguing with someone who is racist. I cannot change their views, but I can as an intelligent human being pick and choose who I debate. In others words I choose not to engage with those that I feel are uneducated, ignorant, and not on my level. You can be racist, just stay in your lane and don’t put your hands on me.

I was struck by her remarkable inability to empathize with the plight of LGBT people.  She finds the comparison of the struggle of LGBT people to the Civil Rights Movement to be deplorable. Clearly she doesn’t understand the underlying reason for the struggle for LGBT rights, which is to achieve equality; the same damn thing as the Civil Rights Movement! Does she not realize that LGBT people have only recently begun to have the right to marry in the United States, which parallels the struggle to legalize interracial marriage?  Does she not realize how often black people have demanded to be represented in music, media, and literature, and how that is a similar struggle of LGBT people?  Is she clueless that LGBT people, like black people, have been subjected to bullying, harassment, and violence simply because of who they are? The efforts to include race as a category in anti-discrimination laws mirrors the efforts to seek protection for LGBT people in the workplace…does she not realize that? There are so many more parallels.  You know what they all have in common:

Discrimination and oppression of a group of people because of who they are.

When she speaks of her skin color never changing, she hints that sexuality can be changed.  Where is the evidence of this?  She provides none.  As I said in the comments at Ashley’s blog, I never woke up one day and decided I’ve love to start sleeping with men. When puberty hit, my hormones went one direction. My first attraction to a man that I can remember is my gym coach when I lived in El Paso, TX back in 1987. I was around 12 years old. I had never heard the word gay or homosexual. I didn’t know anyone who was gay. I had no role models. I couldn’t talk to anyone about how I felt.  Do you have any idea how lonely that can be? How isolated an existence that was? To not be able to share your thoughts with anyone for fear of being labeled a freak? That’s part of what homophobia is like.  This lasted for around 8 years. I tried to be “normal” and date women. I tried to fit in and be what society said I was supposed to be. You know what?

It. Didn’t. Work.

Why?

Because I’m gay.  I was trying to fit into a narrow box that society dictates for people. This narrow, unyielding box couldn’t accommodate me bc it wasn’t for me. I couldn’t fit into something that I wasn’t. This is one of the many problems with patriarchal gender roles.  They set these rules up for the way men and women are supposed to act and anyone outside the confines of those walls is a deviant. Those deviants are subjected to harassment and oppression.  Not for doing anything to anyone. Not for causing harm. Not for causing destruction.  Simply for existing on their own terms.

Existing on your own terms…heh.

That sounds mighty similar to the efforts of black people to be recognized as full human beings with all the attendant rights. It sounds similar because it is similar.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to claim that the Gay Rights Movement is exactly like the Civil Rights Movement. I know they’re not identical.  But there are strong similarities.  The desired outcome is extremely similar:  equality for each group and recognition that they have the right to exist in society on their own terms.

This is one of many things Crystal needs to learn.

There was one other thing that really pissed me off about her comment.

Homosexuals have NEVER been subjected the terror that scores of blacks faced in terms of the lynchings, brutal beatings, maimings, and unjustified killings that blacks endured during slavery and after.

She’s speaking from a position of incredible ignorance.  Part of my response to her included a link to the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies:

In the 1930’s, there began in Germany a persecution of male homosexuals that was, like that of Jews, the worst in their respective histories. Lesbians, since they could contine to breed children, presented no practical reproductive problems to the Nazi state.

The Nazis’ murder of some homosexuals started earlier than that of the Jews with the murders of Ernest Roehm and other brown shirts in his paramilitary group known as the SA, although the major reason for these murders was to eliminate a potentially rival force to the SS. Roehm was a major Nazi leader, second only to Hitler as they rose to power in the 20’s and early 30’s. He and his cadre of “brownshirts” were homosexuals, which was not a problem at the beginning for Hitler, but later did prove an embarrassment and a threat. Roehm and other SA leaders were murdered without warning in a famous blood purge which was led by Himmler and other SS officers at the instigation of Hitler and began on June 30, 1934, which has been called “The Night of Long Knives.”

In writing about the Holocaust, the “gay genocide” has often been either a taboo subject too delicate to touch upon, a topic obscured by other issues, or simply omitted. However there are wellresearched books  for example, John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement: 18641935 [New York: Times Change Press, 19741; Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle [Boston: Alyson Publications, 19801. Richard Plant’s, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals is one of the most outstanding, clearly and eloquently written.

Controversy surrounds every aspect of this genocide, even the label “genocide.” Since gays could “pass” (unlike Jews or Gypsies), most survived the war. If they remained celibate or “in the closet,” they could elude the Nazis and survive. Because they were difficult to detect, a considerable number were never rounded up. Thus, there are strong arguments not to call this a genocide.

On the other hand, there are strong arguments for this to be seen as a genocide: first, the stigmatization of homosexuals as “vermin,” “plague,” “cancerous ulcer,” and “a tumor’ is racist and the kind of dehumanization that enables genocide to occur. Under Himmler’s direction, the ferocity of attack gained impetus to seek out and destroy or sterilize every homosexual the Nazis could find. By the United Nations definition, these acts of sterilization fall under the category of limiting births, thus genocide. It is not an easy decision, but overall I personally adopt a nongenocide label, though it could fall under the rubric of what I would call genocidal acts. As for a planned, systematic genocide, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there was none. Gays were victims of the Third Reich and therefore belong in any Holocaust museum, but I would conclude that gays were victims of a genocidal mentality, and not of outright genocide. [See DEFINITION OF GENOCIDE for more on controversies in defining genocide, including the differing opinion of the editor of the EncyclopediaEd.]

Overall, we can estimate the number of males convicted of homosexuality from 19331944 at between 50,000 to 63,000. The number of homosexuals incarcerated in the Nazi concentration camps is not known, much less the number who died there. Rudiger Lautmann in his Gesellschaft und Homosexualitat: Seminar [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 19771, whose figures are used by Plant and other writers, estimates that somewhere between 5,000 to 15,000 homosexuals perished behind the barbedwire fences. These were victims who were labeled and processed as homosexuals. A figure of about 10,000 homosexuals is the one accepted by most scholars (although figures are thrown about wildly and estimates run as high as Jean Boisson’s one million dead.) Gay leaders and writers insist on higher figures in order to legitimate their claim of special pleading. Yet, why indeed are 10,000 killed less tragic than one million? In the aftermath of the Holocaust, numbers themselves seem to lose their significance. In any case, the major Holocaust institution in the USA, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, recognizes the “gay genocide.”

Did Hitler despise homosexuals? Was he ashamed of his own homosexual or asexual identity? These are areas of psychohistory that are beyond known knowledge. My own feelings are that Hitler was asexual in the traditional sense and had bizarre sexual fetishes. All these things were of course kept highly secret from the German people. But there were other political considerations. Perhaps Hans Peter Bleuel [Sex and Society in Nazi Germany, New York: Lippincott, 19731 summarizes the issue best: “Hitler’s misgivings about homosexuality stemmed primarily from selfinterest. His objection to it as a vice or symptom of effeminacy was only secondary. The main danger, as he saw it, was that it would infiltrate the political leadership and constitute itself a secret Order of the Third Sex. He was also concerned at the thought that population growth might be curbed by the heterosexual abstinence of those affected.”

The Nazi purge of homosexuals from their own ranks was only the beginning. On June 23, 1935, the first anniversary of the Roehm killings, the Nazis began a legal campaign against homosexuals by adding to paragraph 175 another law, 175a, which created ten new criminal offenses including kisses between men, embraces, even homosexual fantasies. The Gestapo and the SS, under the notoriously antihomosexual leadership of Heinrich Himmler, became involved in a steppedup campaign to work gays to death in the camps. Himmler is quoted as follows: “Just as we today have gone back to the ancient Germanic view of the question of marriage mixing different races, so too in our judgment of homosexuality  a symptom of degeneracy that could destroy our race  we must return to the guiding Nordic principle: extermination.” Reich Legal Director, Hans Frank, commented on the new penal code: “Particular attention should be addressed to homosexuality, which is clearly expressive of a disposition opposed to the normal national community … Homosexual behavior, in particular, merits no mercy.”

If anyone can read that and still claim that gay people haven’t suffered from the kind of terror that black people did during slavery and after…they are a vile, disgusting human being with a shattered moral compass. I want nothing to do with them.  But wait, that’s hardly the end of the discrimination faced by gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender people.

What about the homophobia embedded in the country of Uganda, where the government has tried to pass a Kill the Gays bill? This is a country where

Being gay, gay “touching,” discussing homosexuality and broadcasting material that sways public opinion about the current state of homophobia are all offences punishable by sentences up to life in prison, leaving queers legally powerless and socially silenced.

What about the brutal, bloody horror of gay life in Putin’s Russia?

Ever since virulently homophobic Russian President Vladimir Putin pushed through a law effectively outlawing openly gay people, the country’s LGBTQ community has, predictably, been plagued by violence.  Now a study published in Harvard University’s Health and Human Rights journal confirms what myriad horrific anecdotes suggest: Gay people in Russia are being beaten, raped, and murdered at record rates—and the government is doing little to stop it.

What about the fact that a disproportionate amount of hate violence in the United States is directed at trans women of color?

2012 saw the 4^th highest murder rate of LGBTQ and HIV-affected people (LGBTQH) in history, according to the annual Hate Violence Report released by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP). The report analyzes statistics collected in 18 states about survivors and victims’ age, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and type of violence experienced in order to track trends in the violence directed at the LGBTQH community.

The overall LGBTQH homicide rate decreased by 16.7% from 2011, which had the highest homicide rate of all time. The overall rate of violence inflicted on LGBTQH people remained relatively consistent, with a 4% decrease from 2011. Some of the groups most likely to experience hate violence included transgender people (particularly transgender women), people of color (particularly transgender people of color), and gay men. Young people, homeless people, and people with disabilities were also disproportionately represented. In all reported homicides involving transgender people, the victims were women.

The only way one could make the claim that LGBT people don’t (or haven’t) face(d) the same kind of horrific violence faced by blacks is if you’re totally ignorant of what the fuck you’re talking about. In which case, you probably should just shut the fuck up and go educate your damn self.