Q Of The Day: Has LGBTQ Community Overcome Our Four Burdens Bayard Rustin Identified?
Pam's House Blend
by: Autumn Sandeen
Fri Aug 27, 2010 at 08:00:00 AM EDT
http://www.pamshouseblend.com/diary/17170/q-of-the-day-has-lgbtq-community-overcome-our-four-burdens-bayard-rustin-identified (http://www.pamshouseblend.com/diary/17170/q-of-the-day-has-lgbtq-community-overcome-our-four-burdens-bayard-rustin-identified)
I've been fond of quoting Bayard Rustin on the job of the gay community. Here's the quote I've often referenced:
"[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)