Kenyon Farrow has found that gay is not the new black.

During a speech Thursday night as the keynote for Coming Out Month, Farrow, executive director of the nonprofit Queers for Economic Justice, explained how gay civil rights struggles are not the same as black civil rights struggles.

Farrow’s speech was preceded by an introduction from Amit Taneja, the assistant director of the LGBT Resource Center. He discussed how people have been hearing, seeing and reading about the highly circulated phrase ‘gay is the new black.’ This resulted in a growing desire among the public for a deeper analysis on the subject. 

‘Our world is really rooted in a mission of justice and inclusion, and it just doesn’t make sense for us to pick one identity,’ Taneja said. He said he wanted Farrow’s talk to be ‘intellectually stimulating, but also culturally relevant.’ 

Upon taking the stage in front of a packed audience in Gifford Auditorium, Farrow acknowledged he knew people were confused by the title of his presentation. He responded by saying, ‘But it’s a good place to start a conversation.’

He explained how the question first arose in 2008, when the phrase ‘gay is the new black’ exploded in the mainstream as the result of the election of the nation’s first black president and the passing of Proposition 8 in the state of California. Proposition 8 writes into California’s constitution the definition of marriage to be between a man and a woman. 

Suddenly, a widespread sense of unity in the United States due to President Barack Obama’s election had been counteracted by California’s decision, Farrow said. Tensions began to increase between the black and gay communities.

‘This implies that gay or lesbian identity has become the new barometer for oppression and equality,’ Farrow said. ‘Race is no longer the determining factor for suffering, but rather sexual orientation.’

Tensions increased as LGBT advocacy groups began focusing on both equalizing marriage and ending the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy in the military, Farrow said.

Farrow said he wanted to know the roots of the relationship between these gay and black community tensions. He said a mixture of homophobia and the 2008 events were strong contributors to the problem.

During Farrow’s research, he found the LGBT community had fewer votes for Obama than it had for John Kerry. At the same time, he discovered 58 percent of the black community of California had voted in favor of Proposition 8. LGBT advocacy groups were appalled, questioning how blacks, who have undergone much discrimination, were not fully supportive of the legalization of gay marriage, Farrow said. 

Farrow argued the election of Obama and the passage of Proposition 8 were two separate issues.

The LGBT strategies on the campaign against Proposition 8 caused its failure by targeting groups referred to as ‘movable middles,’ Farrow said. These ‘movable middles,’ or people who are not strongly affiliated with any particular side of a campaign, were largely white middle-class women. The black community, only making up about 10 percent of California’s voting population, was not addressed until seven days prior to voting day, Farrow said, severely hurting the LGBT case. 

At the end of Farrow’s presentation, the audience was able to participate in a Q-and-A session. Many audience members did not use this time for questions, but instead thanked Kenyon for being well researched and prepared for his presentation. 

Kathleen Sanchez, a freshman biomedical engineering major, said she found Farrow’s statistics and details useful, because they showed how Obama’s election and Proposition 8 were intertwined.

‘These are events that I believe society did not even know were going on during the time of election in 2008,’ Sanchez said. ‘As a country with so many people from all different nationalities, races and religions, we should be able to accept someone different than us, but we still have not been able to because there is still oppression faced by the queer community.’

As the evening drew to a close, Kenyon said he hopes the community will realize the LGBT agenda needs to channel its energy toward different efforts, essentially transforming its goals to focus on more prevalent social issues, such as education reform and health care.

He then left the audience with one last message. ‘There is a need for real conversations. Gay identity is not a singular identity that can be claimed on behalf of anyone who is queer.’

dbsteinb@syr.edu

Published on October 17, 2010 at 12:00 pm