jodawi | (no subject) (Reply)

Much African American fiction in the twentieth century includes a common pivotal element in the growth of black characters: the first time one stands up to white indignity; refuses to touch one’s hat; objects to being called “boy”; and of course most famously, doesn’t give up one’s bus seat. For gay people, the equivalent experience, reproduced over and over again in fiction and reality, is the time when one finds dignity and courage by leaving one’s family, moving hundreds or thousands of miles, and finally finding a replacement family in the gay neighborhoods of New York, Chicago, or San Francisco. And, very often, never seeing or speaking to that birth family again.

...In living memory, African Americans have had the right to marry and to form families. One of the many evils of slavery was the way it could destroy families, which would stay together only at the suffrance of the master’s pleasure. But from the moment the slaves were free, it was a given that, of course, black people could marry. (Though it sadly took far too long to end the proscriptions against mixed-race marriages.) It pains me that you could regard my right to do the same as some kind of negotiable point.

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