From: HF.GTD@forsythe.stanford.edu (Gabrielle Daniels)
Subject: Re: Lee: Skip work to attend Malcolm X
Organization: Stanford University, California, USA
Distribution: usa
Date: Sat, 5 Sep 1992 00:33:50 GMT

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...
.
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.
.
Finally, a 1982 bit called "Learning from the Sixties" from Audre
Lorde's "Sister Outsider":

Malcolm X is a distinct shape in a very pivotal period of my life.
I stand here now...black, lesbian, feminist...an inheritor of
Malcolm and his tradition, doing my work, and the ghost of his voice
through my mouth asks each one of you here tonight:  are you doing
yours?

There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we
cherish breath and power in our own living.  I'm not going to
pretend that the moment I first saw or heard Malcolm X he became my
shining prince, because it wouldn't be true.  In February 1965, I
was raising two children and a (white) husband in a 3-room flat on
149th Street in Harlem.  I had read about Malcolm X and the Black
Muslims.  I became more interested in Malcolm after he left the
Nation of Islam, when he was silenced by Elijah Muhammed for his
comment, after Kennedy's assassination, to the effect that the
chickens had come home to roost.  Before this, I hadn't given much
thought to the Nation of Islam because of their attitude toward
women as well as their nonactivist stance.  I'd read Malcolm's
autobiography, and I liked his style, and I thought he looked a lot
like my father's people, (Audre Lordes people came from Grenada,
like Malcolms mother) but I was one of the ones who didn't really
hear Malcolm's voice until it was amplified by death.

...In the last year of his life, Malcolm X added a breadth to his
essential vision that would have brought him, had he lived, into
inevitable confrontation with the question of difference as a
creative and necessary force for change.  For as Malcolm X
progressed from a position of resistance to, and analysis of, the
racial status quo, to more active considerations of organizing for
change, he began to reassess some of his earlier positions...
...Malcolm had altered and broadened his opinions concerning the
role of women in society and the revolution.  He was beginning to
speak with increasing respect of the connection between himself and
Martin Luther King, Jr., whose policies of nonviolence seemed to
be so opposite to his own.  And he began to examine the societal
conditions under which alliances and coalitions must indeed occur.
He had also begun to discuss those scars of oppression which lead us
to war against ourselves in each other rather than against our
enemies...In the 1960s, the awakened anger of the black community
was often expressed, not vertically against the corruption of
power and true sources, but horizontally toward those closest to us
who mirror our own impotence...A small and vocal part of the
black community lost sight of the fact that unity does not mean
unanimity...In order to work together we do not have to become a mix
of indistinguishable particles resembing a vat of homogenized
chocolate milk....Over and over again in the Sixties I was asked to
justify my existence and my work, because I was a woman, because I
was a lesbian, because I was not a separatist, because some piece
of me was not acceptable...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?