In the March/April 2009 edition of Colorlines magazine, yours truly is quoted in an article by Black gay writer Kai Wright about the racial faultlines exposed by the Proposition 8 battle last year. Here in an excerpt in which my words of wisdom appear (at the very end of the four-page article entitled "A Fragile Union"):
[Andres] Duques recalls the scene at a packed community forum where a uniformly white panel of movement leaders discussed both Prop. 8 and New York’s future. “I looked around the crowd, and I didn’t see any Latinos, actually. The crowd was Chelsea,” he says, referring to the city’s most well-known gay neighborhood, which is dominated by white men.Of course the Andres Duque quoted here is my friend and fellow blogger at Blabbeando. The entire piece is worth reading!
Ron Buckmire, a leader in the Los Angeles Black gay group Barbara Jordan/Bayard Rustin Coalition, insists, “There’s no way that the LGBT rights movement is going to succeed if they don’t have vibrant LGBT people-of-color organizations. No way.”
The question remains, however, whether the defeat and the acrimony surrounding Prop. 8 have brought that point home to the people and the organizations that power gay rights movements across the nation.
“I’m 78 years old. I been around a long time,” says [Dolores] Huerta. “Sometimes things happen for a reason, and I feel that way about this initiative. The electorate has forced us to take a look at ourselves. Our whole progressive community is going to be strengthened if we do that.”
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