Exploring the frontiers of gay consciousness with Don Kilhefner

From An Old Community Organizer: Don’t Mourn, Organize!

I knew I wanted to be with my black brothers and sisters as the election results came in on Nov. 4, and Jewel Williams, my longtime friend and fellow warrior, invited me down to the ’hood for an Obama party she was hosting at her place.

Over the last four decades, Williams has created a truly marvelous center, which includes the world-famous Catch One disco (jewelscatchone.com, popular with Madonna). There is also a separate building housing a complimentary health care clinic called the Village Health Foundation, providing traditional Chinese medicine and other alternative treatments to people who otherwise would not have access to such valuable healthcare. (In addition to being a successful business woman, Williams is also a licensed acupuncturist and herbalist.) The compound houses In The Meantime, which provides HIV prevention services, designed specifically for gay African-Americans and others, as well as facilitating 12-step groups. Recently, a Soul/Mex vegetarian restaurant has opened there where people can enjoy delicious, wholesome and healthy food not readily available around Pico and Crenshaw.

As I walked into the restaurant election night, the place was packed to the rafters with happy, dancing women and men. The energy level was so high I thought we might spontaneously combust before the evening was over. As Obama and his wife and children stepped onto the stage in Chicago for the victory speech, I swear I saw the roof of the restaurant lift off the joint. As I sat off to the side and observed, I noticed I was the only nonblack there. It reminded me once again, how racially segregated the gay community in Los Angeles often functions in practice.

Many have told me that they could not stop crying election day. The same was true for me. As I waited in line for a half-hour to cast my ballot, I could see wet cheeks on the faces of others who waited. Some waited a half-hour; others had waited several centuries. A collective and historical catharsis was happening across Los Angeles and the nation. A heavy burden was being lifted from the shoulders of blacks and whites at the same time.

I think often of the old black woman who befriended me as I walked from my apartment on 16th Street to Howard University on Georgia Avenue, in Washington D.C. every day in the mid-1960s. She was raised in a rural area near Meridian, Miss. and she taught me about the “jelly bean jar.” When a black person went to register to vote, the white registrar would pull out a jar full of jelly beans and ask how many were inside. No matter what answer you gave, it was always wrong and you didn’t pass the test to register. Our gay brother Adam Nagourney said it best in the lead The New York Times article he wrote after the election: “Many Americans rolled into the streets to celebrate what many described, with perhaps overstated if understandable exhilaration, a new era in a country where just 143 years ago, Mr. Obama, as a black man, could have been owned as a slave.”

I would also like to comment briefly on the victory of Proposition 8. I am planning to write at greater length about the failed strategy of the gay community in this matter in a later column. I did not want to address it leading up to and during the campaign because I wanted to support those gay people and our allies who were working very hard to defeat the proposition. I did not want to contribute to anything other than a united front, but we need to talk with each other about what was wrong with the political strategy some have been pursuing with the single agenda of same-sex marriage.

Most importantly now, I want to extend a deeply felt and genuine “thank you” to all of you who put in many hours of labor into this and to all of those who donated money to the effort. I want to encourage you to not fall into the usual trap of getting energized for a few weeks at election time and then hibernating for four years. Don’t disappear as you usually do; stay in the struggle.

My longtime friend, attorney Barry Copilow, told me the story of his meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Chicago. After graduating from Northwestern University in the 1960s, Copilow taught at a poor, black elementary school on Chicago’s Southside. Copilow was complaining to King about the struggle they faced each day—no books and supplies, sick children, poverty all around them, no one caring—when King looked him in the eye and said, “young brother, it was a struggle yesterday, it is a struggle today, it will be a struggle tomorrow. If it isn’t a struggle, you are doing something wrong.” I want to say the same thing to you. Now is the time for perseverance in the struggle of gay liberation and rethinking our political strategy.

Gay liberation is a liberation movement, not a law reform movement. Law reform occurs only after liberation is secured whether regarding blacks in apartheid South Africa or gay people in the homophobic United States. Liberation is taken, not granted. One never becomes so maladroit as to set up a situation in which one’s oppressor is given an opportunity to vote on your freedom. We do know from the history of the 20th century, that people of color and their white allies overthrew white supremacy. We know that women and their male allies dethroned male supremacy. And, eventually our straight allies and we will liberate us from heterosexual supremacy. There’s no doubt about it.

In the meantime, beloved brothers, shed your tears of joy, shed your tears of sorrow, but keep on marching and fighting back nonviolently against gay oppression like Gandhi, King and Chavez. History teaches us that social and political revolutions only occur in times of rising expectations. During the “Reagan Revolution” of the past 25 years we have been living through a time of lowered expectations. Obama’s election will be ushering in a time of rising expectations in America, and gay people must and will be a part of that social ferment. The time is ripe. Time is on our side.

When Joe Hill, a radical labor organizer early in the 20th century, was being led to the gallows for a crime he did not commit, he shouted out defiantly to his supporters: “Don’t mourn, organize!” I want to strongly encourage you to think and act likewise. In my last column I wrote: “No matter what happens Nov. 4, we have our work cut out for us in the decades ahead.”

Gay brothers, don’t mourn, organize!

Don Kilhefner, Ph.D., played a pioneering role in the creation of the Gay Liberation movement. He is also the co-founder of the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, Van Ness Recovery House and (with Harry Hay) the international Radical Faerie movement. Don is a Jungian psychologist and can be reached at donkilhefner@sbcglobal.net.