Protecting the most vulnerable LGBT people

By David Benkof
DavidBenkof@aol.com
GaysDefendMarriage.com

Many American communities - such as the Catholic community, the Jewish community, and the African-American community - put a lot of resources behind helping the worst-off people with those identities. There are mentoring programs, food assistance programs, even direct aid. A large percentage of the resources raised from wealthy Catholics, Jews, and blacks is spent on the needs and problems faced by Catholics, Jews, and blacks who are the most vulnerable.

It doesn't work that way in the LGBT community. In fact, the gay community tends to prioritize the issues that are most important to the wealthy white donors to LGBT organizations, and it shows little interest in the problems facing people in pain who aren't like them.

The most blatant example is the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which was one of the top 2-3 issues to the gay and lesbian community when I first became a gay activist in the summer of 1990. The gay white men who funded the gay movement at the time were dying of AIDS, and many of their friends were suffering and dying as well. So education, treatment, and funding for AIDS was a major priority to the gay movement.

Not that you'd know it by reading the gay press, but HIV is still a major crisis facing the LGBT community. More than 70 percent of new HIV infections in men happen because of gay sex. One in three African-American gay men is HIV-positive. In some cities it's nearly one in two. But because the specific gay people suffering from HIV these days can't afford to contribute to LGBT organizations, the epidemic has been de-emphasized by the gay movement in favor of issues more important to its middle- and upper-class funders, like marriage. The Web site of the nation's biggest gay political organization, hrc.org, mentions marriage more than five times as often as AIDS.

And what about prison issues? In the 1980s and 1990s, the Bromfield Street Educational Foundation worked to help gay and lesbian prisoners, who are certainly among the most vulnerable members of our community. LGBT prisoners face rape, humiliation, and beatings every day of their incarceration. Studies show transgender people are overrepresented in prisons. Why isn't the LGBT movement paying any attention to prisoners any more? The Web sites of the Human Rights Campaign and the Stonewall Democrats, among others, are completely silent about the needs of gay people in prison. Believe me, incarcerated gay men have far more important things to worry about than the "freedom to marry."

I could go on. While I don't expect the leadership of the LGBT movement to agree with me that trying to redefine marriage is both wrong and counterproductive, surely we could find a compromise that would allow them to continue to advocate for same-sex marriage while also starting to help the most vulnerable members of our community. I propose that gay and lesbian organizations cut their "marriage budgets" in half, and spend the leftover money and staff time working on issues that affect LGBT people who are poor, sick, of color, immigrants, in prison, and otherwise in dire straits, thereby ignoring the irrelevant fact that such people are unlikely to ever be able to afford to go to $275-a-plate dinners at fancy hotels where people wear tuxedos and bid on lavish trips in silent auctions.

I would love to hear a defender of the gay community's current priorities explain what's wrong with my proposal.

Labels: Marriage

posted by David Benkof at 12:43 AM | link

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