From: heath@athena.cs.uga.edu (Terrance Heath)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american
Subject: Re: Lee: Skip work to attend Malcolm X
Date: 5 Sep 92 19:18:30 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens

In article <1992Sep5.003350.26224@morrow.stanford.edu> HF.GTD@forsythe.stanford.edu (Gabrielle Daniels) writes:
>In article <stovall.715638813@ficus.cs.ucla.edu>,
>stovall@ficus.cs.ucla.edu (Steven Stovall) writes:
>>
>>I don't care about his early homosexual experiences, even if they
>>in fact happened (again, I am very sceptical of this assertion; for one
>>thing it does not seem to appear in Hoover's FBI files). What I objected
>>to was a suggestion that Malcolm may have eventually validated homosexuality,
>>had he lived. He could never have validated homosexuality without becoming
>>an apostate. This is therefore using an unproven assertion to promote a
>>political agenda at the expense of a man's name.
>
>
>My, aren't we grasping at straws...!  And deferring to the octopus
>knowledge of the almighty FBI, yet....!
>.
>The FBI files do not show Malcolm's sexual preferences.  I'm sure J.
>Edgar would have had a field day had he known.  He would have
>cha-cha-cha'ed down Broadway.  J.  Edgar Hoover...the most closeted
>homosexual bureaucrat in U.S. history.  But the FBI did not begin
>to shadow Malcolm until 1950 or so, when he was in prison and had
>boasted to someone in a letter that he had always been a communist.
>We don't know what his action was like in prison before he became a
>Muslim either...

Hmmm.  You never know who'll come steppin' out once you start knockin'
on closet doors. Hoover, Cohn, McCarthy, Bayard Rustin, Langston,
Arna, Lorraine, Bessie.....and Malcom? Well, who know's for sure? I,
for one, will be glad when we finally reach a point where EVERYONE can
simply be who they are, and live with honesty, dignity and peace. I
have a feeling even Malcolm would appreciate that much.

Honestly, I've had it to here with black folks who mouth those words
and then turn around a badmouth another group of people. Lately, it
seems like gays have become the new "Willie Horton", in both black and
white communities. (So I'm a young, single, gay black male. All this
means that I am supposedly the walking emboidment of not only whats
destroying the black family, but also at the root of what is wrong
with this entire country. I never realized I was such a powerful
little bugger as to topple an entire race and an entire country).
Just last week I stood up and stormed out of a church service (down
the middle aisle) after the minister prayed for a world where everyone
is free, and then turned around in his next breath cursing the very
existance of gays (I suppose he would have me believe that I am not
included in "everyone". I do not suffer hypocrites lightly, especially
when they spout their hypocrisy in the name of God.

>Oh, come off it, Steven.  Like I said, and like Terrance said, black
>folk (and any other folk) get mightily disturbed at the least
>"dirties" messing up their image of a hero(ine).  You're pissed at
>the suggestion, veiled or otherwise, that Malcolm might have
>recognized the brothers and sisters beyond the (hetero)sexual pale.
>You expound (to your dying day, probably), that the Malcolm you know
>wouldn't have done that, that Malcolm is being smeared by some
>'conspiracy.' I've already given you the reasons why I think that
>rationale is TIRED, wasted and easily blown out of the water, not
>even conducive to black folk uniting around common goals, needs and
>aspirations.  Let's kick out who ain't black enuff now.  Is that all
>you have to say now that black folk around the world are an
>endangered species, even in Africa?  in Yugoslavia?  in the U.S.?
>Scratch a cultural nationalist and you find a religious
>fundamentalist fanatic.
>.
>Sorry.  I say the Malcolm I KNOW and appreciate might have
>eventually put his hand out to the black, political, gay brothers
>and sisters who are doing the work in solidarity and respect.  I
>think he would have recognized that to be black and gay is not some
>kind of "white thing," that it is something quite different from
>being some rich white man's "butler" toy.
>.

[preceding words from Audre Lourde, posted by Gabrielle, omited]

...Referring to black lesbians and gay men,
>the student president at Howard University says, on the occasion of
>a gay student charter on campus, the black community has nothing to
>do with such filth, we will have to abandon these people.  Abandon?
>
>There is no black person here who can afford to wait to be led into
>positive action for survival...For while we wait for another
>Malcolm, another Martin, another charismatic black leader to
>validate our struggles, old black people are freezing to death in
>tenements, black children are being brutalized and slaughtered in
>the streets, or lobotomized by television, and the percentage of
>black families living below the poverty line is higher today than in
>1963...And if we wait to put our future into the hands of some new
>messiah, what will happen when those leaders are shot, or
>discredited, or tried for murder, or called homosexual, or otherwise
>disempowered?  Do we put our future on hold?  What is that
>internalized and self-destructive barrier that keeps us from moving,
>that keeps us from coming together?


	The internalized barrier that keeps us from coming together is
the seemingly unshakable desire to look at a fellow persons as things,
rather than human beings. It is the mechanism by which we turn
ourselves into subjects and others into object, into "ho's", "faggots"
or "niggers", in order to make them different from ourselves, while
essentially seeing ourselves as human. Once we objectify a group of
people, we may treat them differently than ourselves, because we see
them as less than ourselves.  I ask you, If I am not accorded the same
rights that you are, what is my place in society? Subject or Object?
	When we turn people into objects, rather than seeing them as
subjects, human and equal to ourselves, we can then treat them any way
we like. We can discriminate against them. We can experiment on them.
We can rape them, and their children. We can enslave them, using
whatever means we choose. We can lynch them. All because they are not
persons. They are things. Otherwise we would treat them as we expect
to be treated, wouldn't we?  We would not deny anyone who was a human
equal to ourselves the same rights as ourselves, would we?
	Unfortunately, some of us who are really and truly seen as
things by the "powers that be", are busy drawing subject/object lines
between our own, over issues of gender or sexual orientation, setting
up a hierarchy of our own as an imitation of the larger hierarchy
which marginalizes us all. It keeps us jabbing at one another with
sticks so that we might not see the larger system, and so that we
might not come together to topple that hierarchy.


-- 
"Black men loving black men is THE revolutionary act!"
			-Joseph Beam_
Terrance Heath 
heath@athena.cs.uga.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american