Despite an overall societal shift that favors LGBT inclusion in all aspects of American life, members of the black LGBT community continue to face a unique set of challenges mainly from their clergy, cites an article on NewsOne.com. “The church still has so much influence and they continue to use influence in a negative way,” say Pastor Joseph Tolton of Rehodoth Temple Christ Conscious Church in Harlem. “[Y]ou’ve got people being driven further and further into the closet.”
Antonio David Garcia, executive director of Affirmations, a Detroit-area LGBT civil rights group, says what’s worse is that those opinions are often homophobic and go unchallenged. “Every day we face religious bigotry [from the church],” Garcia says. “They’ve got to start questioning some of the stuff they’re hearing from the pulpit. Dr. King made that very clear in what he talked about as the soft mindedness of sheep being followed by the priest.”
But despite what some see as a tectonic shift in attitudes among the African American community toward, say, same-sex marriage, some in the LGBT community still nurse – privately – a resentment at what they say is the lingering residual effects of homophobia caused by the black church. In a recent Pew Research Center report, more than 80 percent of African Americans consider themselves to have some religious beliefs with at least half of them attending church activities on a weekly basis. And the message that is still being preached is one of intolerance, stoking fears among the African American community that homosexuality shortens lives, causes disease and puts insurmountable obstacles to their collective progress before a community that knows all too well we live in anything but a “post-racial” America.
The solution, others argue, is visibility. As Garcia rightly observes, “Many African American and Latino men are on the down low and are not out and open. And that is, as Harvey Milk would say, the most important thing. Once they come out of the closet those families that those people belong to are forced to make a decision. Not an intellectual decision but an emotional decision. It’s one thing to say I don’t like gay people. It’s another thing to say I don’t like my son or my uncle Jim.”
But one factor that is frequently cited as cause for hope has nothing to do with the church. It’s the substantial generational shift occurring in the United States. The Millennial generation, born from 1982-2000, overwhelming supports causes like same-sex marriage, are more likely to have an interracial relationship and, most importantly, are one of the least religious generations in some time. This, perhaps more than anything else, gives members of the black LGBT community reason to believe that, as far as being open about who you are, the only way to go is out.
