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Fear of the Queer: Blacks in Florida vote to oppress gays
By Bob Norman
C. Stiles
Mahee wanted to flee the state after the vote.
Newly
elected state Sen. Chris Smith always gets a visit from his Aunt Bertha before
major elections. She likes to look at his voter's guide to get the lowdown on
the issues.
Smith, a former Democratic House leader who was elected to the Senate on the
same ballot as Barack Obama, says his aunt is usually amenable to his ideas —
just not when it comes to gay issues.
Before the November 4 election, Smith told her he was opposed to Amendment 2,
the statewide initiative to make gay marriage and civil unions
unconstitutional.
Aunt Bertha balked.
"She's very active in our church, and she got upset," recalls Smith, one of
Broward's top black leaders. "She said, 'God's law says that Adam can't marry
Steve.' And the more I talked with her about it, the more upset she got."
Aunt Bertha played into one of the great ironies of last week's historic
election. She was one of numerous civil rights-minded black voters who cast
their ballots for Obama at the same time that they chose to deny gays and
lesbians the right to marry. The anti-gay marriage measure passed statewide and
garnered a majority of votes in every county in Florida but Monroe, which
includes gay-friendly Key West.
Even in the alleged liberal bastions of Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade
counties,
a majority voted for the measure. And the black vote weighed
heavily in all of them.
It's one of the great paradoxes in American politics. The black community,
the most oppressed group in U.S. history, has traditionally comprised the most
unfriendly demographic toward gays, arguably the
second-most-discriminated-against group.
In short, it's time for blacks in America to wake up. The black community has
gotten a free pass on its rampant homophobia, beginning with the denial of the
AIDS problem until it ravaged their neighborhood. Gay activists have almost
given up on trying to influence black America, but last Tuesday's vote shows
that another tactic is overdue.
Bluntly put, blacks must be exposed on their homophobic attitudes and
challenged on them.
The numbers, though roughly drawn, are overwhelming. While about 96 percent
of black voters favored Obama, 70 percent of them were opposed to gay marriage,
according to both pre-election and exit polls.
Let's break down Broward County. With nearly 200,000 registered black voters
in Broward and a turnout of about 70 percent of them, polls suggest that nearly
three-quarters of them voted in favor of the gay marriage ban.
Focus groups organized by opponents to Amendment 2 figured out early on that
a large majority of blacks opposed gay marriage but that they, like Aunt Bertha,
only become hardened in their resolve when someone tries to persuade them
otherwise.
For that reason, Florida Red and Blue, a Miami-based group that raised $3.7
million to fight Amendment 2, largely left the black community alone with its
outreach efforts. Instead, opponents chose to focus on black college students
and young women, who have been found to be the most receptive to the cause.
Oakland Park activist S.F. Mahee worked as the Broward organizer for Florida
Red and Blue. She is also a black lesbian who has urged the African-American
community to take a stake in gay issues. She knew gay rights advocates faced
challenges in the black community.
"Speculation is that the momentous turnout that Sen. Obama provided may have
actually hurt us in the end when it came to the religious African-Americans that
turned out," Mahee says. "If you can make the connection about discrimination,
then African-Americans are overwhelmingly with us. But if someone else focuses
on homosexuality, then we lose African-Americans."
Veteran gay activist and West Palm Beach lawyer Rand Hoch puts it in stark
terms. "Black people have consistently been less supportive of gay and lesbian
rights than any segment of the population in Florida," he says.
Sen. Smith, who lives in Fort Lauderdale with his wife, Desorae, and two
kids, agrees, and he provides three reasons. "Religion, religion, and religion,"
he says. "Even pastors who I know and love and have supported for years, we got
into deep arguments about it, and they didn't want me to make that
recommendation [on Amendment 2]. I couldn't convince them. Religion plays a
heavy part in it. Last Sunday, there were signs surrounding each church saying,
'Vote Yes on Two.' I went to every church from Boynton Beach to Fort Lauderdale,
and at every church were those signs."
It didn't help that South Florida is home to the Rev. O'Neal Dozier, one of
America's most virulently antigay black ministers. Dozier leads the Worldwide
Christian Center in Pompano Beach, and he famously said that gays make God "want
to puke." Like so many black ministers, he rallied his congregation against
Amendment 2.
Elgin Jones, columnist for the black-owned Broward Times, largely
agrees with Dozier's views. He shares the "social conservatism" that's a
hallmark of black politics.
"Most people think that black folk are these bleeding-heart liberals, but
that's not the case," says Jones, who voted to make gay marriage
unconstitutional last week. "They are socially conservative. You wouldn't know
it by who they vote for, but they vote that way because of things that are
important to them: civil rights, jobs, health care. Not social issues."
Jones, a dogged journalist who has dug up a lot of corruption in black
politics, says it's offensive to most blacks when their plight is compared to
that of gays.
"When homosexuals try to use the blessing of those who are black to help
their cause, it has failed, and it will continue to fail," he says. "If they are
seeking rights, I don't think they will be successful comparing homosexuality to
race. I think most people see it as a slight or an insult."
Jones concedes that many gays and lesbians seem to be born that way. But he
compares them to people who seem to have a propensity for crime. He compares it
to a trait he has to seek harsh revenge when someone has wronged him. "I was
born with that. I was born in a family that has done a lot of violent things.
But I was taught that was wrong, so I don't act on it. I think people are
sometimes born with an urge to steal or to rob or to be lazy, but that doesn't
mean you act on it because you have urges."
Translation: Homosexuality, Jones claims, is a crime that should be snuffed
out.
Hoch, who is white, says he has seen, through his gay activism, an urge in
the black community to deny that homosexuality exists. Smith adds that it's
largely hidden under the "machismo" running through the male culture.
"In ethnic communities, really all ethnic communities, African-American,
Cuban-American, there's a lot of machismo," he says. "So whenever you talk about
anything gay, it goes beyond religion. Culturally, it was hard to embrace AIDS
because AIDS was the 'faggot disease.' Once AIDS became a black disease, the
church woke up."
Smith says he will probably co-sponsor a long-floundering gay-rights bill to
outlaw discrimination against homosexuals in employment and housing. He has
hopes that the measure will get a modest amount of support among blacks.
The senator says he believes blacks might also support his bid to overturn
the ban on gay adoption. "That's a battle I think we can win," he says. "You
have gay people serving as foster parents, and you have hundreds of thousands of
kids that need adopting. That's a battle we can win to treat everyone
equal."
But Smith admits that he has been met with a stone wall in trying to raise
awareness about gay issues in his district. He says that when he gives speeches
in black churches, he often brings up the issue, but it's never popular.
"If you think gay marriage is against God's law, then adultery is against
God's law too," the senator says. "Are you going to make it a crime to have an
affair? You can't legislate all of God's law. When I mention that, I get some
agreement, but that's only if I can get to that phase of the argument. Usually,
I get shut down before I get there."
For Mahee, it's understandably more personal than that. She says that when
she got up on the morning after the election, her first impulse was to flee the
state. Then she realized that Arizona and California, one of the nation's more
progressive states, had passed the same initiative on the same day.
"I am in absolute and complete awe," she says. "I am in awe that we can elect
the first African-American president and that on the same day, we can write
discrimination into the state Constitution. Our education is at the bottom of
the heap. We have a state House that just had to apologize for its participation
in slavery last session. We have a gay adoption ban. I am afraid Florida has
become in this millennium what Mississippi was to the civil rights
movement."
Smith, though, says the irony is that the black man who was elected to the
White House is, like him, sympathetic to gay causes — though not gay marriage
itself.
"In Barack's speech, he mentioned the people, and he said gay and
straight," Smith remembers. "He's the new president of the United States,
a black man, a religious black man. Hell, he sat in Rev. Wright's church, and he
said gay and straight. That's something that gives me hope."
