By David Ehrenstein
October 31, 2007
All the characters in this melodrama played their roles to the hilt. Gay-rights organizations demanded that McClurkin be dropped. Numerous bloggers cast doubt on the fullness of McClurkin's "recovery." Obama's campaign staff hastily added a gay minister to give an opening prayer. But it was McClurkin who dominated the event, claiming before an audience of about 2,000 Sunday in Columbia, S.C.: "I don't speak against the homosexuals. I tell you that God delivered me from homosexuality. No matter what blog you read, let me tell you, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature!" (For all of McClurkin's religious talk, biblical scholars remind us that Jesus had not a word to say on the subject.)
Adding fuel to this fire was Obama's reply to questions about the concert. He haughtily told a reporter from the gay news magazine the Advocate, "If there's somebody out there who's been more consistent in including LGBT Americans in his or her vision of what America should be, then I would be interested in knowing who that person is." (The answer, of course, is Dennis Kucinich.)
...Black churches are so much at the center of African American public life, and so much in denial about the gays and lesbians in their pews and choir stalls. As the late Marlon Riggs said in "Tongues Untied," his acclaimed 1990 documentary about gay blacks and AIDS, "How many choir directors have to die before we know who we are?" The "Embrace the Change" lineup reflects how this struggle is far from over. McClurkin, who is a minister at an evangelical church in New York, calls homosexuality a "choice" -- needless to say the wrong one. The duo Mary Mary claims to love gays in a love-the-sinner kind of way, equating us with murderers or prostitutes. It is only Byron Cage of the Mighty Clouds of Joy who has been actively working to heal the gay-straight divide.
Gays played pivotal roles in African American history, but the community continues to wish away their sexuality. Blues legends Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter and Ethel Waters all took female lovers. (Impresario Leonard Reed once said Waters was "so mean she married her second husband to spite her girlfriend when she found out she was sleeping with him.") Gay composer Billy Strayhorn gave the Duke Ellington Orchestra its sound, including its theme song, "Take the A Train." The fabled Harlem Renaissance was, frankly, a gay and lesbian movement led by the likes of Zora Neale Hurston, Bruce Nugent and Langston Hughes.
Over and above all these towers James Baldwin, the novelist and essayist whose accounts of the civil rights movement are without peer, and Bayard Rustin, the most important civil rights figure after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Rustin conceived of the 1963 March on Washington, but thanks to a vice arrest in Pasadena a decade earlier, he was forced to take a back seat during the unveiling of his masterpiece.
Coretta Scott King never forgot Rustin's sacrifice and went on to support the gay-rights movement. Her daughter, however, the Rev. Bernice King, joined a 2004 march against same-sex marriage. And so we now find Obama trying, as it were, to court both branches of the King family. It won't work. And his continued relevance to gay and lesbian African Americans is over.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-ehrenstein31oct31,1,1680186.story?coll=la-news-a_section