To the Editor:
While it was smart of Amiri Barksdale to try and ward off criticism of his column ("Gays and the Civil Rights Movement," The Dartmouth, Jan.18), it nonetheless merits some kind of response. I am curious as to where he got the information that most homosexuals are white middle-class gay men... The Dartmouth Review? Just because the corporate media perpetuates that stereotype because it finds whiteness fascinating does not mean that the statement is true. White middle-class gay men may have the least to lose by coming out, but we are, in fact, everywhere.
Some Homophobia 101: gay men, lesbians and bisexuals are daily denied housing, job protection, custody of their children and personal safety. Hate crimes that are motivated by homophobia have been on the rise. To expect civil rights is not a selfish end, it is a way to ease survival on a daily basis.
The simple-minded configurations of whether gays deserve protection depending on whether we were "born that way" or "chose to be that way" are irrelevant. Religion is a choice that is protected under the Constitution as much as race, a "birthright," so whichever way you slice it there is no reason to deny queers their civil rights.
As to the more sticky question of "the new civil rights" - there have been gay leaders who have used the rhetoric insensitively. They have been called on it by gays of color - of whom there are many. Again, the casting of the new wave of gay activism as a quest for the "new civil rights" is perpetuated by a media looking for a new story to write, finding it easier to use glib factoids and metaphors rather than explore the complexity of the issues.
Pitting communities of color against the gay communities is not only profitable to bigots, but painful for those of us who are both queer and of color. I refuse to separate racism from homophobia from sexism in my life and if Barksdale had bothered to talk to any other gays of color, he would have found this was so.
If he had bothered to read works by Audre Lorde, Cherie Moraga, Pratiba Parmar, Essex Hemphill or Marlon Riggs, amongst a host of other prominent gays of color, he would have found that the issues he tossed around have been discussed with fierce passion and intelligence by those writers and others. If he had bothered to pay any attention at all to media outside of Newsweek and CNN he would have discovered that gays around the world, from Japan to Russia, are fighting for their basic civil rights.
Bayard Rustin, the architect of the first March on Washington for Civil Rights, was asked to "hide" the fact that he was gay in case it sidetracked the "real" issue of racism. This kind of thinking is what I and many others struggle against every day.
SHIMI SUBRAMANIAM '94
