The Bilerico Project

Obama & Romney Can't Fence Sit on Marriage Equality

Rev Irene Monroe — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 10:00:00 -0500

While President Obama's attitude concerning same-sex marriage is evolving, and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's attitude is an unequivocal denouncement, the American people seem to moving solidly toward an acceptance of marriage equality. Both Obama and Romney need to get with the program.

Simply put: In the last presidential election it would have been political suicide to support marriage equality. This November it may be a risk not to.

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What's In a Greeting?

Rev Irene Monroe — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:00:00 -0500

What's in a greeting?

With Ramadan, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, and Christmas all going on this time of year, one would think that an all-inclusive seasonal greeting emblematic of our nation's religious diversity would be embraced by us all with two simple words - "Happy Holidays."

However, in 2011 the season's greeting is a continued chapter in the culture war spearheaded by what the Christian right calls the "War on Christmas."

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America's Gay Confederate and Union Soldiers

Rev Irene Monroe — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 12:00:00 -0500

Queer Civil War buffs have been arguing for some time that the deafening silence around LGBTQ Confederate and Union soldiers indicates proof of their very presence.

With this month commemorating the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War, I went combing through Civil War annals for our queer brethren - and I found them!

When shots were fired from Fort Sumter, a fortification near Charleston, S.C., signaling the war's beginning, its gay Confederate and Union soldiers didn't have to worry about Clinton's infamous DADT policy, which blatantly discriminates against LGBTQ servicemembers.

Those soldiers, unlike today's, did not have to bear their souls to disprove that military readiness is a heterosexual calling, nor did they have to prove that their patriotism to the cause was diminished because of their sexual orientation.

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Malcolm X Was Gay for Pay

Rev Irene Monroe — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:00:00 -0500

Before any of us in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities laud Malcolm X as our new gay icon or castigate him for being a black heterosexist nationalist on the "down low," we might need to closely examine the recent revelation that for a period in his life Malcolm X engaged in same-sex relationships.

Also, before any of us in the African American community flatly dismiss these assertions as part and parcel of a racist conspiratorial propaganda machine that is out to discredit our brother Malcolm, we need, at least, to hear these nagging claims.

And this time hear them coming from one of our own - Manning Marable, a renowned and respected African American historian and social critic from Columbia University.

Sadly, Marable died April 1, just days before the release of his magnum opus, an exhaustive and new 594-page biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, on April 4th, which also marks the anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968.

His assertions in the book - deriving from meticulously combing through 6,000 pages of F.B.I. files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, records from the Central Intelligence Agency, State Department and New York district attorney's office, as well as his interviews with members of Malcolm X's inner circle and security team - leaves the reader in shock and awe.

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The Gandhi None of Us Knew

Rev Irene Monroe — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 16:00:00 -0500

It has been not quite a century since Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948 at the age of 78 in New Delhi, India. The bevy of hagiographies written about him is now being replaced with truth-telling biographies about the Gandhi nobody knew.

The most recent one is titled Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India by Joseph Lelyveld.

And according to Lelyvard, Gandhi the pacifist was a wife-beater, denied sex to his wife for decades, was purported to be a "celibate" living life as an ascetic but actually was a pedophile who ritualized sleeping naked with underage girls in order to test "the ferocity of his sexual desires," and at one point left his wife for a male lover.

While one would think, at first glance, reading Lelyveld's shocking revelations about Gandhi, it's all tabloid fodder for a rapacious audience that diets on sordid tales, Lelyveld, former editor of the New York Times, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, pays meticulous attention to details.

Between 1908 and 1910, Gandhi left his wife to be with wealthy German-Jewish bodybuilder and architect Hermann Kallenbach. But the only evidence Lelyveld gives the reader, suggesting the bonding of the two men was at least homoerotic if not homosexual, is a salacious one-liner where Gandhi allegedly told Kallenback, "How completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance." According to Gandhi's own wife, Gandhi engaged in heterosexual intercourse, but it repulsed him so much it actually made him physically ill, and he vowed never to attempt it again.

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Like Black Church, St. Patrick's Day Parades Are Anti-gay

Rev Irene Monroe — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 19:00:00 -0500

Irish and African-American lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) communities share a lot in common when it comes to being excluded from iconic institutions in their communities.

For LGBTQ African-Americans, it's the black church, and for LGBTQ Irish, it's the St. Patrick's Day Parade.

St. Patrick's Day has rolled around again, and like previous March 17th celebrations nationwide, its LGBTQ communities are not invited. As a contentious and protracted argument for now over two decades, parade officials have a difficult time grasping the notion that being Irish and gay is also part of their heritage.

Unlike the black church, however, that has and continues to throw the Bible at its LGBTQ community to justify their exclusionary practices, the St. Patrick's Day parade committee uses the First Amendment, debating that they are constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of religion, speech and association, and the tenet separating church and state.

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Rev. Peter Gomes: Accidental Gay Advocate

Rev Irene Monroe — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 08:30:00 -0500

If during your tenure as a student at Harvard you did not encounter the Reverend Peter J. Gomes, you have not had the quintessential Harvard experience.

For undergraduates, if they were paying attention, Gomes bookended their four-year experience at Harvard with his welcoming remarks during orientation and his baccalaureate address at graduation.

In between those years, undergraduates had ample opportunities to partake in Gomes' weekly teas at Sparks House, the university's parsonage, to hear his rich melodic baritone voice most Sunday mornings preaching at Memorial Church in the Yard, or to enroll in his popular courses: Religion 42: "The Christian Bible and its Interpretation," which I had the privilege to be his head teaching fellow for several years, and Religion 1513: "History of Harvard and its Presidents."

During the wee hours of the morning this past Tuesday when I received a phone call from a reporter at WBUR, the voice on the other end said "Hello and Good Morning Rev. Monroe. I would like to speak with you before our 8 a.m "Morning Edition" Show about the passing of Rev. Gomes. I'm very sorry if you're not aware of his passing. I want to talk with you about his legacy and impact in your life and Harvard's," I dropped the phone in despair.

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Haitian Vodou and the Acceptance of LGBTQ Identities

Rev Irene Monroe — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 16:00:00 -0500

In celebrating Black History Month is year, I want to lift up our West African ancestral religious contributions. One of them for me as a lesbian, is the contribution of Vodou.

As one of the religions brought to the New World by the African Diaspora, there is no religion that frightens and fascinates the world over as Vodou.

What most people do not know is that its spiritual tenets allow room for the acceptance of all people, of all sexual orientations and gender expressions.

Today's popular culture misconstrues Vodou with racist images of zombies rising from graves, jungle drums, orgiastic ceremonies ritualizing malevolent powers of black magic, and cannibalism. In reality, Haitian Vodou is an ancestral folk religion whose tenets have always been queer-friendly.

Ironically, homosexuality has been legal in Haiti since 1986, but few protections and provisions come with it. For example, same-sex marriage, and civil unions are not recognized, and it is unclear whether LGBTQ couples can adopt children or have custody of their own children. LGBTQ Haitians do not openly serve in the military, and the nation does not have anti-hate crime legislation that specifically addresses the discrimination and harassment of LGBTQ Haitians.

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The Black Civil Rights Movement Is Dying, Finally

Rev Irene Monroe — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:00:00 -0500

Last week, Martin Luther King tributes were taking place across the nation. And the spirit of MLK and the courageous acts of our foremothers and forefathers of the civil rights movement are etched indelibly in many of our hearts.

But the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King's era of the 1960's is dying a slow and necessary death.

And for many African Americans of younger generations, who are now the beneficiaries of the racial gains from the Movement, feeling the Movement's slow death is like a welcoming boulder gradually being lifted from their shoulders, especially for those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer.

With many key African American organizations and institutions of the civil rights movement of the 1960's still resistant to address this generation's outwardness about their sexual orientations and gender expressions as a civil rights issues, these organizations and institutions have not only lost their mantle as part of a prophetic justice movement for this day and age, but many of our present day key African American organizations and institutions of the Movement have also lost the moral high ground that was once so easily associated with them.

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Huckleberry Finn's N-word: Artistic Integrity or Ethnic Property Rights?

Rev Irene Monroe — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 12:00:00 -0500

As Americans we have a hard time talking about race in this country when the n-word is not involved. And when this epithet is, predictably, we behave schizophrenically.

And much of the kerfuffle is about who's staking a claim on its use.

The now recent kerfuffle concerning the n-word is focused on Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known fondly to us as Mark Twain, and the New South Books edition of the 1885 controversial classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

In a combined effort to rekindle interest in this Twain classic and to tamp down the flame and fury the use of the n-word engenders both from society and readers alike, who come across the epithet 219 times in the book, Mark Twain scholar and English professor at Auburn University in Alabama Alan Gribben proposed to replace the n-word with the word "slave."

"The n-word possessed, then as now, demeaning implications more vile than almost any insult that can be applied to other racial groups. There is no equivalent slur in the English language. As a result, with every passing decade this affront appears to gain rather than lose its impact. Even at the level of college and graduate school, students are capable of resenting textual encounters with this racial appellative," Gribben writes in the introduction of the new edition.

I think for grade and middle school students, the word should be removed. I remember reading the text as a sixth grader at a predominately white public school in Brooklyn and suffering mightily from both the teacher's inept ability to contextualize the text and from my classmates' insensitivity concerning the epithet. But several years later, unfortunately, I experienced "deja vu all over again" with this text. This time, I was a first year student at Wellesley College and suffering mightily, because of the professor's ineptitude in contextualizing the use of racist language.

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Lesbian priests marrying each other!

Rev Irene Monroe — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 11:00:00 -0500

All couples like to bring the New Year in on a loving note, and what better way for two lesbian priests of the Episcopal Church to demonstrate their commitment to each other than in holy matrimony.

Before a jubilant crowd of 400 guests on New Year's Day, the Rev. Mally Lloyd, former pastor at Christ Church in Plymouth, and now a ranking official of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, married the Rev. Katherine Ragsdale, dean and president of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. And Bishop M. Thomas Shaw, the state's highest ranking Episcopal official, presided.

No doubt, Lloyd and Ragsdale's nuptial is historic. And both should be applauded for their courageous act.

The news of their wedding is traveling swiftly throughout the Episcopal Church. And while many of us here in Massachusetts -- one of the few U. S. states that legalize same-sex marriages -- rejoice of Lloyd and Ragsdale's news, the fallout, which many are anticipating from the conservative arm of the church will, perhaps, not be a quiet storm.

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Should Kwanzaa Stay in Black Neighborhoods?

Rev Irene Monroe — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 10:30:00 -0500

Immediately following Christmas this year will mark Kwanzaa's thirty-eighth anniversary. From December 26 through January 1, millions of African Americans, like myself, will start their week-long celebration by greeting families and friends with the Swahili term "Harbari gani!" which means "What's happening!" Much of what will be happening will be talk about whether the commercialization and takeover by larger retailers of this holiday celebration violates the seven principles (the Nguzo Saba) of Kwanzaa.

Kwanzaa, which means "the first fruits of the harvest," was founded in 1967 by Dr. Maulana "Ron" Karenga, then chairman of the African American Studies department at California State University at Long Beach. Thought to be a black version of Christmas, Kwanzaa is neither a religious holiday nor a substitute for Christmas. It is a spiritual and cultural holiday whose seven principles of unity (umoja), self-determination (kujichagulia), collective work and responsibility (ujima), cooperative economics (ujamma), purpose (nia), creativity (kuumba), and faith (imani) represent and reaffirm traditional African American values that extend to all Americans.

The practice of black economic power and self-reliance have kept the holiday of Kwanzaa financially afloat. Unlike Christmas, which is characterized by rampant commercialism and the accumulation of material objects, Kwanzaa's emphasis is on human relationships and on the spiritual ties and responsibilities that African Americans first have to one another, and then to the larger society.

However, gifts, called zawadi, do play an important role during Kwanzaa. Gifts exchanged are either handmade or purchased from African American vendors in keeping with the fourth principle of Kwanzaa known as cooperative economics.

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Remember our homeless gay youth this holiday

Rev Irene Monroe — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 19:00:00 -0500

The holiday season is a difficult time of year many of us.

Our culture's egregious forms of commercialism always bother me, as well as its anemic recognition of other celebratory forms of this holiday season other than Christmas, like Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Ramadan, and the celebration of the winter solstice.

Too often we see the glitz and glamour that this holiday brings and we have totally missed its spiritual message.

And because much of the spiritual aspects of this season are lost, so too, by too many of us, is the gift of giving to the neediest in our communities. In my community, one of the neediest is our LGBTQ homeless youth and young adults.

Unfortunately, our LGBTQ homeless youth and young adults face the annual angst of searching for home for the holidays.

"I'm Queer. I'm Homeless. I'm Hungry. I'm Scared. I'm Tired," is the ad put out this year by New Alternatives for LGBT Homeless Youth asking us to give the gift of $10 this holiday season to help our homeless.

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Oprah is not gay, folks

Rev Irene Monroe — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 16:00:00 -0500

Oprah is known everywhere around the world, and has touched nearly everyone.

Her media stardom and public ministry make her omnipresent as well as omnipotent. Her converts would argue she is also omniscient, especially with her monthly oracle -- O, The Oprah Magazine -- pontificating the principles of self-help, self-love, and self-giving.

Oprah's principles empower women the world over and derive from her own personal narrative.

And because she has been so public about her life, it appears that no topic is off-limits with the queen of daytime talk. But when it comes talking about her private sexual life, the public feels, Oprah is neither honest nor open.

The public no longer queries Oprah about her longtime boyfriend, Stedman Graham, of twenty-plus years: they met in 1986, were engaged in 1992, and now no wedding is in sight.

And it's rumored the relationship soured, and that Oprah and Stedman no longer reside together -- although she denies it -- but he still ceremonially shows up as Oprah's escort for important photo-op moments, like the Dec. 5 Kennedy Center honors. And according to the recent Star Magazine article titled "O, Please!: Oprah & Stedman Put on a Show," the "distance between the two isn't just geographical."

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Thumbs up for 'Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys'

Rev Irene Monroe — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 16:00:00 -0500

The long-awaited reality series "Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys," highlighting the unconventional relationship between heterosexual women and gay men deputed on the "Sundance Channel" on Dec. 7. The show is produced by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, the gay producers of "RuPaul's Drag Race."

And the show is going to be a great reality series.

Why?

Because "Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys," reveals how honest and raw interpersonal dynamics in friendships emerge among unconventional and fiercely loving and supportive relationships between heterosexual women and straight men contradicts the dominant views of gender and sexual identity coupling.

And the show not only gives a human face to this reality of straight women with gay men as their "best friends forever" (BFFs), but the show also highlights our universal yearning for a person with whom we have a feeling of deep and natural affinity, love, intimacy, spirituality, and compatibility -- irrespective race of gender and sexual preferences.

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