Gays Vs. Blacks in the American Armed Forces
Gays Vs. Blacks in the American Armed Forces
For some veterans of the civil-rights era, it's a matter of stolen prestige. "It is a misappropriation for members of the gay leadership to identify the April 25 march on Washington with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 mobilization," one such veteran, the Reverend Dennis G. Kuby, wrote in a letter to the editor that appeared in the Times on the day of the march. Four days later, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee's hearings on the issues of gays in the military, Lieutenant General Calvin Waller, United States Army (retired), was more vociferous. General Waller, who, as General Norman Schwarzkopf's second-in-command, was the highest-ranking black officer in the Gulf War's theatre of operations, contemptuously dismissed any linkage between the gay-rights and civil-rights movements. "I had no choice regarding my race when I was delivered from my mother's womb," General Waller said. "To compare my service in America's armed forces with the integration of avowed homosexuals is personally offensive to me." This sentiment -- that gays are pretenders to the throne of disadvantage that properly belongs to black Americans, that their relation to the rhetoric of civil rights is one of unearned opportunism -- is surprisingly widespread. "The backlash is on the streets among blacks and black pastors who do not want to be aligned with homosexuals," the Reverend Lou Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, crowed to the Times in the aftermath of the march.
That the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People endorsed the April 25th march made the insult all the deeper for those who disparage the gay-rights movement as the politics of imposture -- Liberace in Rosa Parks drag. "Gays are not subject to water hoses or police dogs, denied access to lunch counters or prevented from voting," the Reverend Mr. Kuby asserted. On the contrary, "most gays are perceived as well educated, socially mobile and financially comfortable." Even some of those sympathetic to gay rights are unhappy with the models of oppression and victim hood which they take to be enshrined in the civil-rights discourse that many gay advocates have adopted. For those blacks and whites who viewed last month's march on Washington with skepticism, to be gay is merely an inconvenience; to be black is to inherit a legacy of hardship and inequity. For them, there's no comparison. But the...