Gay Blacks Launch Ads To Broaden Support
Help Sought to Defeat Same-Sex Marriage Ban
By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 9, 2003; Page A03

A coalition of gay and transgender African Americans announced yesterday that it will use a nationwide advertising campaign to reach out to a group that some say seems to dislike them most: the broader African American community.

 
Representatives of the National Black Justice Coalition said their goal is to inform black Americans about marriage equality for same-sex couples and drum up black community opposition to a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, which has been proposed by some conservatives.

The coalition's announcement, at a news conference in Washington, followed statements by black Republicans and clerics denouncing gay rights organizations for comparing their movement to the black struggle for civil rights.

"I believe there's no comparison whatsoever," the Rev. Talbert W. Swan II of Solid Rock Church of God in Christ said yesterday. His church is in Springfield, Mass., where the state Supreme Court recently ruled that gay couples can legally marry.

In an earlier statement, Swan had said that homosexuality "is a chosen lifestyle" and that race is different because "I could not choose the color of my skin. For me to ride down the street and get profiled is something a homosexual will never go through."

Republicans have said the gay marriage issue could persuade African Americans, who tend to be churchgoing, to embrace their agenda.

Keith Boykin, a spokesman for the coalition, took issue with that idea. "Don't be fooled by a few recent poll numbers into thinking that marriage will divide the black community in the upcoming election year," he said. "African Americans are somewhat more conservative about marriage than we are about other civil rights issues, but this is not new and this is not news. We vote on jobs, the economy, health care, war and peace, and social justice."

A poll released last month by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that African Americans oppose gay marriage by a 2 to 1 ratio.

A separate study released in 2000 by the Policy Institute of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force reported that one-fifth of respondents to its Black Pride Survey had negative experiences in the black community, and nearly half -- 43 percent -- had a negative experience with a black church.

Swan said equal marriage could not be used to divide the black vote because Republicans are too conservative on other social issues. But he said gay marriage was not an issue he supports. "You will find no passage in the Bible . . . where God smiles on homosexuality," Swan said.

Boykin, who served as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton, said the coalition plans to spend $100,000 to place advertisements in black magazines, such as Ebony, Essence and Jet, and black newspapers, such as the Michigan Chronicle in Detroit and the Baltimore/Washington Afro-American.

Mandy Carter, another member of the coalition, said the group would meet to determine what the ads should say. But their intent is to convince black people that discrimination against committed couples on the basis of sexual orientation is a form of social injustice.

"We can't get family health insurance, so we have to pay two deductibles instead of one," Alicia Heath-Toby and Saundra Heath-Toby, a same-sex couple, said in a joint statement. "We are your neighbors next door. We ride the bus and subway with you. We sit next to you at lunch."

Civil rights organizations that sponsored sit-ins at lunch counters in the 1950s and '60s -- the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference -- have been silent on marriage equality, as has the National Urban League.

"We haven't formally taken a position," said Sheriee Bowman, director of information and public relations for the SCLC. "We would definitely be open to a dialogue, but we don't know enough about what their issue is."

Boykin said the coalition will contact each civil rights group. Coalition member Maurice Franklin, who once worked for the SCLC, called on the groups to work with them in the memory of Bayard Rustin, a gay black man who helped orchestrate the 1963 March on Washington with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

"For decades, black gays and lesbians sat at the table silently and patiently while everyone got their piece of the American dream," Franklin said. "So today we are asking the civil rights leadership to live up to their legacy and moral compass and not let the American dream of freedom turn into a nightmare for gays and lesbians."