Q Of The Day: Is Controlling Anti-LGBT Sentiment One Of Our Primary Jobs?
by: Autumn Sandeen
Wed Dec 10, 2008 at 03:15:00 AM EST
http://pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=9E8A7FB0D8AFE1644C2D0B265182111A?diaryId=8558Bayard RustinWhen discussing civil rights for LGBT people, I'm more than occasionally found referencing Bayard Rustin's take on what "our job" is as LGBT people and/or civil rights activists:
"[T]he job of the gay community is not to deal with extremists who would castigate us or put us on an island and drop an H-bomb on us. The fact of the matter is that there is a small percentage of people in America who understand the true nature of the homosexual community. There is another small percentage who will never understand us. Our job is not to get those people who dislike us to love us. Nor was our aim in the civil rights movement to get prejudiced white people to love us. Our aim was to try to create the kind of America, legislatively, morally, and psychologically, such that even though some whites continued to hate us, they could not openly manifest that hate. That's our job today: to control the extent to which people can publicly manifest antigay sentiment."
--Bayard Rustin; From Montgomery to Stonewall (1986)
