Why No LGBTs at the State of the Black Union?

Lesbian reporter Karen Ocamb has an interesting piece up at Bilerico.com called "Tavis Smiley's Big Day Without Gays" where she asks where were the Black LGBT people at Tavis Smiley's State of the Black Union conference held at the Los Angeles Convention Center last week?

So this year's SOTBU promoted Tavis' new book - "Accountable: Making America As Good As Its Promise" - the final in his Covenant trilogy. And during the discussion, he asked that he, too, be held accountable. So, Tavis, we will.

This year, there was a lot of focus rightfully placed on economics. But here, too, don't we LGBT people matter? Today it is legal to fire, harass or deny promotions to people in 30 states based solely on the basis of their real or perceived sexual orientation and in 38 states, based on gender identity or gender expression. Barack
Obama supports a law that would end such discrimination - but it may take awhile to get that through Congress and onto his desk.

Meanwhile, the Williams institute at UCLA School of Law released a report last October showing the wide gap between straight and same sex African American couples in California, which the Institute says is home to the second-largest percentage of the nation's coupled black men and women. The study also shows that nearly 55 percent of black women and 11 percent of back men in same-sex couples in California are raising children.

Study co-author Christopher Ramos said:

"We find that gay and bisexual black men in California have household incomes that are 44 percent lower than their heterosexual counterparts."

Williams Institute Senior Research Fellow and study co-author Gary Gates said:

"African-American men and women raising children in same-sex couples experience economic disadvantage compared to their different-sex married counterparts with lower household incomes and home ownership rates."

And the LGBT people said, "Ain't we disadvantaged, too?"

[...]

As Phill Wilson, founder of the Black AIDS Institute who has been living with HIV for over 27 years, repeatedly says - AIDS is a Black disease.

Recently, Wilson released their annual State of AIDS in the Black Community entitled "Left Behind! Black America: A Neglected Priority in the Global AIDS Epidemic."

Here are some of the conclusions:

- Black Americans represented 45 percent of people newly infected in 2006, despite being just 13 percent of the population;


- AIDS is still the leading cause of death for Black women aged 24-34; 65% of new HIV/AIDS diagnoses among women in the U.S. are Black; and Black women are 23 times more likely to be diagnosed with AIDS than white women

- Men who have sex with men accounted for 53 percent of all new infections in 2006, and young Black men were particularly hard hit.

- In 2006, Black gay and bisexual men between the ages of 13 and 29 accounted for more new HIV infections among gay and bisexual men than any other race or age group. And more than half, or 52 percent, of all Black gay and bi men infected that year were under 30 years old.

- The CDC's annual HIV-prevention budget has never topped $800 million--a fraction of what the U.S. spends on the Iraq war in a week.

[...]

Or how about Phill Wilson and Bishop T.D. Jakes on setting aside ideologue and the saving of souls on hold to develop a strategic plan to save Black lives?

[...]

LGBT African Americans have been fighting and surviving and failing and succeeding, just like their heterosexual counterparts - but with considerably less general support and often hostility from within the Black family and church - inducing tremendous private emotional, spiritual and psychic trauma. It takes tremendous courage to come out in the face of possibly losing everything and everyone one loves. What if we had missed a Sojourner Truth or a James Baldwin or a Phill Wilson or a Dr. Kevin Fenton? And how many are holding themselves back now as the secret of who they are eats at their soul?

But - as someone else said during Tavis Smiley's State of the Black Union:

"Do you know who we are? We are the children of the one's who would not die."

And Ain't We LGBT?

There have been some interesting comments on the post up at Bilerico, one of which made the point that Tavis has tried to include openly gay Phill Wilson and Keith Boykin before and was setback by the virulent homophobia of his mother, whom he is very very close to. Karen says the piece may also be up at Huffington Post soon.