Yeah. Sure. Go to Cleveland Heights. They're not in the closet there. Or come down here to Dallas and go over to the Oak Lawn area. They're not in the closet over there, either.
White, black, purple, whatever.
Show 'em my motto!
Posted on 03/13/2004 7:23:35 PM PST by mhking
Black America's casual homophobia hardly speaks well for a people who have experienced so much discrimination themselves. But this bit of knee-jerk bigotry is no longer a mere social failing. It is now also a killer, keeping black gays in the closet and contributing to the rise of HIV.
From the black church to the barbershop, a gay-bashing ethos is so prevalent that black men who have sex with other men refuse to admit that they're gay. Indeed, according to Dr. Helene Gayle, one of the nation's top African-American experts on AIDS, some black parents prefer to falsely accuse their HIV-infected sons of drug abuse rather than admit that the son is gay.
Just last week, a black Atlanta radio talk show host, Coz Carson, was on the air denouncing the push for gay marriage, claiming that support for same-sex unions promotes the increase in HIV among black men -- as if homosexuality, not HIV, were contagious. Carson has it backward. It is homophobia, such as that which he so proudly displayed, that promotes the spread of HIV.
Given the hostility they face, black gays and lesbians are less likely than whites to come out of the closet, to form support groups or to seek counseling about safe sex. Can it be any wonder, then, that black Americans -- men and women -- constitute a disproportionate share of HIV and AIDS cases?
While black Americans account for only about 12 percent of the population, they account for about 54 percent of all new HIV infections. And black women are 23 times more likely to have AIDS than white women. Just a few years ago, researchers discovered a primary reason for that alarming statistic: black men who engage in homosexual activity secretly -- or "on the down low" -- while continuing to sleep with their wives or girlfriends, who are then vulnerable to infection.
Now comes news that risky sexual activity -- usually homosexual encounters on the down low -- have brought about a high rate of HIV infection in black male college students in North Carolina. And there is no reason to believe those statistics represent some anomaly limited to that state. If the same test were used in Georgia, a similar rate of infection could well appear among Atlanta's black college men.
Atlanta has a well-developed network of down low clubs and organizations, according to writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis, who profiled that milieu in several cities last year for The New York Times. "For young black men, Atlanta is the hub of the South, a city with unlimited possibilities, including a place in its vibrant DL scene," Denizet-Lewis wrote, describing "clubs, Web sites, Internet chat rooms, private parties and special nights at clubs" -- all of which are designed to allow closeted gay black men to meet each other. He also describes several of the young black men he met, including 31-year-old Rakeem:
" 'We know there are black gay rappers, black gay athletes, but they're all on the DL,' Rakeem says. 'If you're white, you can come out as any openly gay skier or actor or whatever. It might hurt you some, but it's not like if you're black and gay, because then it's like you've let down the whole black community, black women, black history, black pride.' "
Dr. Walter Massey, president of Atlanta's all-male, historically black Morehouse College, says he has encountered young men struggling with their sexual identities as they try to fit traditional roles. "Above all, black men are taught and raised to be . . . men, to raise families, to be fathers . . . be a leader in his community and in his home. Any black male who is seen not to fit that kind of role probably suffers a lot of identity problems," he said.
After an incident in 2002 in which a Morehouse student assaulted another for allegedly looking at him too long in a communal shower, Morehouse started reaching out to its openly gay students, as well as teaching tolerance to its larger student body, Massey said. But the school still struggles to develop programs for "that other group of students" who have sex with men but don't wish to be called gay. "This is a new area for us," he said.
But no support group or safe-sex counseling would do those young men as much good as broad acceptance of homosexuality. If black America doesn't let go its bigotry, it may end up sacrificing what W.E.B. DuBois called its talented tenth.
True, but sometimes unprotected heterosexual sex w/in the confines of marriage w/o one party knowing of the other's HIV status also gives you AIDS and will kill you. Of this, I personally know as it happened to someone very close to me. However, I understand that such scenarios probably represent a very tiny percentage of actual cases.
With respect to Cynthia's article, I reject her premise that it's black "homophobia" which is the cause of black men on the DL and the rise in HIV infections in the black community. Basically, she's saying that blacks who believe that homosexuality is a sin and should be discouraged are the cause. Blacks who believe such are basing their belief on the word of God and their Christian faith. Thus, Cynthia might as well be saying that Christianity is the cause of the rise in HIV infections in the black community. Just as that is absurd, so is her article.
It is bad, and it baffles me how this is tolerated in the black community. We are known to be very religious people, but one would not get any sense of that from the music, the movies, the promiscuity, the out-of-wedlock births, the crime . . . everything. I'm very confused by it all. Though I am pleased that the black community has not embraced homosexuality, will there soon be a day that that too shall come to pass?
He must have meant ice skater, or whatever.
Boston Magazine Defends Articles About Molestation
W.E.B. DuBois
September 1903
The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races. Now the training of men is a difficult and intricate task. Its technique is a matter for educational experts, but its object is for the vision of seers. If we make money the object of man-training, we shall develop money-makers but not necessarily men; if we make technical skill the object of education, we may possess artisans but not, in nature, men. Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools — intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it — this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life. On this foundation we may build bread winning, skill of hand and quickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and man mistake the means of living for the object of life.
If this be true — and who can deny it — three tasks lay before me; first to show from the past that the Talented Tenth as they have risen among American Negroes have been worthy of leadership; secondly to show how these men may be educated and developed; and thirdly to show their relation to the Negro problem.
Even WITH all the support groups AND safe sex information, homosexual men are STILL dying of AIDS because thy continue the behavior that causes it! I'd venture to say that the VAST majority of HIV in the black population of the US is caused by dirty needles and unprotected heterosexual sex.; exactly what the problem is in Africa.
Sorry but the statistics show otherwise. The highest percentage of new HIV infections in the homosexual community are among gay black men even though they are a minority population.
Likewise the highest percentage of new HIV infections in the heterosexual community are among blacks even though they are the minority.
Please don't tell me these two stats are totally unrelated.
Common sense tells us that homosexual activity among black males is crossing over into the "hetero" community because we have so many closet gays.
Yeah. Sure. Go to Cleveland Heights. They're not in the closet there. Or come down here to Dallas and go over to the Oak Lawn area. They're not in the closet over there, either.
White, black, purple, whatever.
Show 'em my motto!
Predominantly LBJ and his "Great Society" program.Ask yourself, how could government create a "great society" without first being "great" itself? Clearly, LBJ was actually promising a "great government." But if he had put it that way, I hope even liberalism-besotted Democrats of 1964 would have smelled a rat; saying "society" when you mean "government" is an evasion of the meaning of "liberal" ideology.To Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell I would, in this context, add the book on the Great Society, Losing Ground. It shows the GreatLiberals always mean "government" when they say "society." It is so ingrained in the liberal "thought" pattern that they actually don't notice the difference between the two words. In fact of course, a government which totally subsumes society, which allows no difference between the two, is the dream of tyrants and slave masters. A program to merge the two is not a promise to society but a deadly threat to freedom.
SocietyCatastrophe in economic statistical charts. It marks, for example, the particular year that a statistically measurable portion of black teens made the fatal choice of a dole over the discipline of a job which would have made an important contribution to their community and to their own future. Without the Great Society, Al Sharpton would have become a rich used-car dealer, and the country would have been the better for it.Those statistics show that blacks would have been ahead of the game if the Great Society had never happened - and if you look at successful Republican progams of subsequent years, they mostly have been retrenchments of the Great Society.
That was before the transmission of AIDS via unprotected hetero sex and heroin needles was publicized. By 1990 AIDS was a major killer in the non-gay black population.
In Washington, DC, circa 1990, the municipal AIDS clinic was the subject of an ugly fight. The directorship was given to a high-ranking member of Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, who immediately ceased all favorable reference to medically approved treatments such as AZT and instead touted the "Afro-centric" quack potion called Kemron. After a few years of that, virtually all the clinic's constitutients were dead and new AIDS patients wouldn't come near it.
But no support group or safe-sex counseling would do those young men as much good as broad acceptance of homosexuality. If black America doesn't let go its bigotry, it may end up sacrificing what W.E.B. DuBois called its talented tenth.
Does she think the "Talented Tenth" are all closet homos or something? I can't figure this woman out.
(I have the same trouble with a lot of her articles, but especially this one. What do you MEAN here, Cynthia?)
I'd have trouble developing a program for people who are in complete denial, too.
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