Washington Blade - March 22, 2002
Rhonda Smith

Mandy Carter, a longtime gay civil rights advocate who lives in North Carolina, said it is politically significant that many of the 2,645 respondents who took part in the Black Pride Survey 2000 identified marriage and domestic partnership matters as priorities.

"Marriage and domestic partnership appear to be issues that resonate in communities of color," she said. "Therefore, let's make sure that the faces and voices of the Freedom to Marry movement reflect that diversity. It can and should.

"And let's not make the mistakes made with the gays in the military issue," she said, "where there were almost exclusively white faces and voices [discussing this matter] when we know that the military services are full of tons of lesbians and gay men of color."

The Black Pride survey results appear in a report titled, "Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud," which was to be released publicly this week by the New York-based Policy Institute of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force. The survey represents the largest national, multi-city sample of black gay people ever gathered, the report's authors said.

Cathy J. Cohen, a professor of political science and African American Studies at Yale University and one of five researchers who assembled the report, said 10,000 copies of it would soon be distributed to black public officials and various organizations and individuals nationwide.

"We want to generate discussions about the lives of black gay people, about the politics of both black communities and gay communities, and about how to improve the living conditions of black gay people in this country," said Cohen, currently a visiting professor at the University of Chicago.

A total of 2,645 black gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people completed the 35-question survey in 2000 at Black Pride events in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Houston. Fifty-eight percent of the respondents were male, 40 percent were female, and 2 percent identified as transgender.

A black gay cross-section

Cohen said the data in the report is not representative of all black lesbian and gay people and focuses on a small, targeted group of individuals who attended Black Pride events in 2000.

"In the past, we could say, æI know 10 black gay people and this is what they think,'" she said. "Now we can say that across the country we've talked to 2,600 people. It gives us a little more power in terms of making claims about what this population feels."

The survey results show 51 percent of respondents had a college degree or more, 29 percent had some college, 17 percent had a high school diploma, and 3 percent had less than a high school education.

Two-thirds of respondents said they were registered Democrats and one in 10 said they were registered Republicans. The respondents' median household income was between $30,000 and $40,000.

The survey results also indicate that less than a third of respondents (31 percent) owned their homes, which the report's authors said is much lower than the 47 percent overall black home ownership rate, based on 2000 Census Bureau data.

Gerard Fergerson, a researcher for the project and the openly gay director of Research, Planning & Evaluation in the office of Washington's Deputy Mayor for Children, Youth & Families, said the study provides more authoritative data about black gays, especially about health-related issues such as HIV/AIDS. "We're going to be able to dispel a lot of rumors about our community," he said.

The Black Pride Survey 2000 began to take shape in 1999 after Chicago resident Willa Taylor, a former co-chair of the National Black Lesbian & Gay Leadership Forum, mentioned it to Urvashi Vaid, the Policy Institute's former director. Vaid asked Cohen to help coordinate this effort, and she recruited other black gay scholars and researchers to help. Their aim was to learn more about the lives of black gays nationwide by getting them to share information about their family structure, political behavior, racism experiences, homophobia, and policy priorities.

Ranking the issues

Many survey respondents agreed that racism is a problem in the white gay community, the report states, and homophobia is a problem in the mainstream black community. Fifty percent of survey respondents said racism is a problem for black gays in their relations with white gays. Two thirds of the respondents said homophobia is a problem among the general black population.

Black gays identified HIV/AIDS, hate crime violence, and marriage/domestic partnership as the leading issues facing black gay people, but they ranked drugs, education and HIV/AIDS as the three leading issues facing the general black population in the U.S.

"Black people understand that while we share a general experience, being black and gay or being black and a woman or being black and poor means we can have very different experiences," from each other and from white gay people, Cohen said.

"There's not one black experience or one black political agenda," she added. "So we need organizations that represent the diversity of how black people live their lives in this country and abroad."

Cohen is author of "The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics," a book published in 1999, in which she argues that if mainstream black organizations like the NAACP ignore the needs of poor African Americans or black gays, those people should hold the organizations and its leaders accountable.

"If issues such as HIV/AIDS and marriage/domestic partnership are not showing up as important to our national black organizations like the NAACP," Cohen said this week, "we need to figure out ways to have those organizations change their agenda to include these issues or to develop new organizations."

Kenneth Jones, the research director at the NGLTF Policy Institute, said national gay organizations increasingly are working with black mainstream organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League. The Task Force participates on the Leadership Council on Civil Rights, a coalition of civil rights groups from across the country, as does a representative from the Human Rights Campaign.

"However, there remains work to be done," Jones and Juan Battle, the report's lead researcher, said in the report. Battle is an associate professor of sociology and holds joint positions at Hunter College and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

"Although a few more churches and black political organizations are beginning to address HIV/AIDS, for example, these efforts are, for the most part, too little, too late," they wrote. "Sunday sermons preaching against our very existence are still commonplace. Our family forms are not universally respected or even recognized. Many of us still face physical violence and harassment in our own communities because we are, or are perceived to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender."

In addition to holding mainstream black organizations such as the NAACP accountable, Cohen said predominantly white gay organizations must also be held accountable when they fail to address all the needs of gay communities of color.

"If the Human Rights Campaign or NGLTF do not address the needs and the issues affecting black gay people," she said, "we need to force them to change their agenda or build our own national gay organizations for gay folks of color."

In recent years, various black gay leaders such as Carter have increasingly said gay people of color should create their own national autonomous, self-sufficient organizations to address gay and other civil rights issues. Such organizations would set their own agendas, Carter said, but also work with predominantly white gay organizations on issues important to both groups.

Parents but not queers

The Black Pride survey also revealed that almost 40 percent of women said they have at least one child. In contrast, 18 percent of men and 15 percent of transgender people reported having one child.

"The parenting data are interesting because they show the falsehood of the anti-gay movement's construction of ægay' and æfamily' as mutually exclusive categories," said Sean Cahill, director of NGLTF's Policy Institute.

The report highlights why anti-gay adoption and foster parenting policies might pose a particular threat to black gays and blacks generally. Cahill noted that the three states with explicitly anti-gay adoption or foster care policies -- Florida, Mississippi, and Arkansas -- have larger black populations.

"Anti-gay adoption bills may threaten the black community as a whole," the report concluded, "by significantly reducing the potential pool of foster and adoptive parents."

One in five survey respondents reported being biological parents, while 2.2 percent said they were adoptive or foster parents.

The report also noted that 20 percent of transgender respondents reported a lack of health coverage, the highest percentage of any group in the survey.

The Black Pride survey also explored the terms that black gays use most often to identify their sexual orientation.

The report noted that 42 percent of respondents self-identify as "gay," while 24 percent describe themselves as "lesbian." About 11 percent of respondents said they are bisexual, while 1 percent identify as transgender. Eight percent of respondents (more men than women) identified as "same gender loving."

"In contrast to the high levels of agreement on the labels gay and lesbian," the report's authors said, "Black LGBT people do not readily, or even remotely, identify as 'queer.'" The term "queer" was one of the least popular options, the report stated, receiving 1 percent of the responses.

FOR MORE INFO

Black Pride Survey 2000

To download after April 1:

www.ngltf.org/pi/blackpride.htm

To obtain a copy:

National Gay & Lesbian Task Force 202-332-6483 Cost: $10

"The rejection of the term queer might indicate that the radical promise that the term queer holds has not been embraced by black GLBT individuals as an alternative way (and politics) of sexual identification," the report said. In addition, more than half of those surveyed said their church or religion viewed homosexuality as "wrong and sinful," while 25 percent said their church was accepting of homosexuality.

News reporter Rhonda Smith can be reached at rsmith@washblade.com.
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