THE RAMBLINGS OF AN OLDER GAY MAN ON THE OPPRESSION OF BLACKS IN NORTH AMERICA

I’m not upset that Pride celebrations have been canceled this year. My thoughts are partially blurred by the coronavirus and from incidents of the past week, but now seems like a time for quiet reflection when we consider all that we’ve gained—and all the people we’ve lost along the way.

At this moment in time, it feels right to ponder not only where the LGBTQ movement needs to focus on a global scale, but how our voices can contribute to other groups in society that face even greater fear, discrimination and neglect. I don’t know how it’s deemed controversial to say Black Lives Matter. I can’t understand how saying this makes some white people feel left out so that they have to tweet instead that all lives matter. Of course that’s true. But that waters down the fact that, right now, it is Black people in North America—yes, in Canada, too—who feel especially marginalized. Sometimes we need to recognize who needs a microphone and a platform and it might be better if the rest of us shut up and listen.

For forty-eight hours this weekend, I didn’t just shut up, I shut down. And I realize that was a luxury. I had begun to feel agitated last Monday as I continued to see reports online about the death of Georgia jogger Ahmaud Arbery and as I kept scrolling past a video of some woman in a park whose dog seemed to be resisting being on a leash. I finally stopped and watched, feeling a bit uncomfortable peeping in on an apparent conflict in Central Park. (Conflict always makes me uncomfortable, in my own life, on the news, even in movies.) At first, I concluded that this was just a dog walker giving dog owners a bad name, choosing to let her dog roam off leash in an area where leashing your dog was required. Too often, I’ve seen dog owners get lippy when they don’t have a leg to stand on: Don’t tell me what to do with my dog! The man filming the incident came off as remarkably calm and I thought, damn, why am I never that composed when pulled into a confrontation? Then I was stunned. The white woman, Amy Cooper, called the police to report, “There is an African American man,...he is threatening myself and my dog.”

The act was shameful because of its implications. Sadly, people in the U.S. understand that there is heightened uncertainty and risk for a Black person when the police are called in. If race hadn’t been mentioned or, more strikingly, if the conflict had been with some white guy, this would not have been an extraordinary call to the police. People often threaten to call the police and wind up following through when goaded or when the threat alone doesn’t scare off the other person. They exaggerate an incident and the police have to come and sort out the problem. The police are the cooler heads; the disturbance most often ends with no charges laid.

But the man wasn’t white and race was immediately at play. Twitter swooped in. It struck me as a vigilante form of shaming the woman and, within twenty-four hours, she had to surrender her dog and got fired from her job. Honestly, I was distressed for all parties involved: the man, Christian Cooper; the dog being separated from its familiar caregiver; the police who have to sort through aggravating he said/she said spats on a daily basis; and, yes, the woman. I’m a lifelong educator and I saw this as a real learning opportunity for Amy Cooper, perhaps through a justice circle with Mr. Cooper and some Black leaders. (Yes, I saw people on Twitter alleging animal abuse. That charge seemed as trumped up as Amy Cooper’s emergency phone call. The woman appeared to have gotten into a distressed state wherein she was, sadly, not aware of the distress to her dog. Others, I know, weren’t so generous; they would argue that, through it all, she had the wherewithal to make a calculating phone call to potentially endanger a Black man who was out bird watching.) I didn’t like her actions. I liked the Twitter swarming even less. How much indignant retweeting must occur before a message is duly conveyed?

By the next morning, news was spreading about the death of George Floyd while being apprehended by Minneapolis police. I saw a key photo many times but I didn’t look close up, nor did I watch the video. I couldn’t stomach such a thing. The accounts of what happened seemed consistent. For me to watch seemed voyeuristic and disrespectful. It’s the same reason I must look away whenever they show footage of planes crashing into the World Trade Center. This was a man’s life. He loved and was loved. Other people will be tasked with looking at the evidence: a judge, a jury, police representatives, civil rights advocates. It did not require closer scrutiny from me sitting in my condo in downtown Vancouver, Canada.

I knew this incident would lead to massive protests and possible violence. Like after Michael Brown was fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Like after four officers were acquitted in 1992 after a videotape showed them beating up Rodney King in Los Angeles during an arrest. These things don’t just happen. There is a build up, a period in which Black people gain a platform to talk about how they are targeted by law enforcement. It's nothing new but a series of high profile events offers proof to of a longstanding, pervasive sense that any encounter with police is particularly scary if you happen to be Black.

I was aghast when I woke up Friday morning to read that the president of the United States tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” You can’t walk back shit like that. As usual, the “leader” missed his opportunity to be presidential, craving whoops and online "likes" from his base instead of recognizing the legitimacy of peaceful protests as an important expression of anger and a call for justice while also asking for cooler heads to refrain from looting and destruction. He fanned the flames and showed how out of touch he was in understanding the anger and the frustration, not only over George Floyd’s death, but over the sense of despair that nothing would ever get better. He failed to show any reflection on the assertion that Black people, especially Black men, are viewed and treated differently.

This gay aging Canadian white gay felt angry too, but I knew that I didn’t need to clutter up the Twitterverse with my sentiments when, in the heat of all this, Black voices needed to be heard, first and foremost. Still, my own anxiety and despair rose and, by Friday afternoon, I went fetal in my bed, vowing to steer clear of social media and all news outlets for at least the weekend. I warned my boyfriend that I was feeling very off and, even though he’s a coronavirus news junkie, I made him agree to no TV news and no sharing of whatever popped up on his phone. White privilege permitted me to take a time out to try to regain some semblance of peace of mind.

On Sunday night, I heard some distant chanting and I felt ready to reenter reality. I quickly changed from my pajamas du jour, threw on a baseball cap to cover an unsightly mop of big hair—I’d taken a break from hair product as well—and walked down Granville Street toward the plaza at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the city’s go-to spot for any and all protests.

I was too late. If I’d made it on time, I’m sure I would have listened and maybe my presence would have offered one protester some sense of greater belonging. Look that old white guy. He’s either lost or he supports us. Well, it’s something. I guess.

Or maybe not. Maybe it would have only stoked my liberal brain. As if my showing up at a rally in a different country in a place eighteen hundred miles away from where George Floyd died does anything at all. I’ve seen conflicting messages from Black people on social media about what white people should and shouldn’t do. Some want us to shut up. It’s their anger and we will never truly know it because we haven’t lived it.

True enough. I can draw some distant parallels as a gay man who experienced homophobia and who often feared for my safety in high school hallways and when jogging alone in Dallas suburbs as people rolled down car windows and yelled slurs (Did my running stride have a telltale prance in it?). I always had my car keys in my hand as I walked from gay clubs in West Hollywood to my car, always parked too many blocks away on streets that never seemed to have enough lighting. I’d read about homophobic police and about the harassment that led to the Stonewall Riots. I’ve had neighbors paint hate messages on the garage door of the house that my then-partner and I bought, back when it was a bold-ish move to live beyond Vancouver’s safer gay ghetto. I’ve had my apartment broken into and vandalized, the repulsed intruder apparently seeing my Advocate magazines and photos of my partner and me and scrawling anti-gay graffiti across my bedroom wall. And I’ve too often heard church-sanctioned vile, particularly during my eleven years in Texas: “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” It’s “sorry, not sorry” with a self-righteous twist. Indeed, I’ve felt oppressed for being a minority—arguably not a visible minority, but not really...people always knew. 

 

As a minority, you can get a little paranoid. You can hear the snickers behind your back even when nobody’s there. It’s a helluva way to live.

Pride? So often, it was but a pipe dream.

While some Black people have wanted whites to yield the stage right now and have criticized celebrity expressions of support—from Madonna’s WTF video of her son dancing to the music industry’s call for a fuzzy “Blackout Tuesday”—others have demanded that everybody speak up and keep the heat on until real change comes. We are complicit, they say, when we are silent. It reminds me of ACT UP’s motto during the AIDS crisis: Silence = Death.

If only there were signs that life for Blacks in America was improving.

I lived in Los Angeles when video emerged of Rodney King being beaten by police. When the acquittal came on April 29, 1992, I’d only been on the job for six weeks as a research attorney at the Los Angeles County Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. My office was a windowless space—basically a re-purposed closet at one end of the third floor, next to a women’s employee restroom. As I left my office to grab a file from the courtroom, the hall was empty except for one court liaison officer.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, an odd question for mid-afternoon on a Wednesday. After I explained my errand, she said, “Didn’t you hear about the acquittal? Everything’s been shut down. Everyone was sent home.” There was fear in her voice. I didn’t think to ask why she was still there. I grabbed my things from my office and rushed to my bus stop, the streets eerily silent save for helicopter noises in the air.

I waited and waited with a sense of anger and dread. It was incredulous to think officers would be found not guilty for such a clear case of excessive force against a Black man. This would not go over well.

When the “express” bus finally showed up, it was crammed with other lower level downtown workers relieved for a ride back to the cozy la-la land of greater La-La Land, Santa Monica. People were subdued as they chatted, sharing expressions of shock over the jury verdict. And then when the bus got on The 10, passing exits for Vermont, Western, Crenshaw and LaBrea, all talk stopped. We stared out the windows, gazing on both sides, to see the urban landscape dotted with the flames and rising smoke from various fires. People often describe scenes of devastation as resembling a war zone and, in that moment, that’s what came to my mind. This was an expression of rage and despair, the kind of pandemonium that can come when proper channels of order and reason seemingly fail.

Only the most militant in any cause would support planned violence and rampant looting but this was simply a gut reaction, helped along by a mob mentality. Law had failed so lawlessness took over.

Then, as now, this kind of reaction can distract. Looting and setting fire to stores and vehicles warrant condemnation, but too many conveniently fixate on that and that alone. “Deplorable!” they say. Indeed, during the Rodney King riots, 63 people died and 2,383 were injured.

That first night, I picked up my AIDS Project Los Angeles buddy in Venice and cut through a neighborhood as a shortcut to our usual Italian restaurant for dinner. “I wouldn’t go here,” he said. “Too many Blacks live here.”

Don was three decades older than me and, in my head, I dismissed his remark as blatantly racist—on this of all nights! As we approached a stop sign, we saw a large group of people—yes, Black people—marching in the street, chanting. Good for them, I thought. And then my backseat window was smashed out. Hands shaking as I tried to grip the steering wheel, I slowly moved forward and got us out of there, my sole focus being on getting Don, who by then walked with a cane, to safety. If we’d been mobbed, how would I have protected him?

I don’t know why—perhaps I was still in shock—but Don and I proceeded with our pasta marinaras. It was easier to stay the course, supporting someone with AIDS, rather than figuring what role, if any, I had in responding to a Get Out of Jail Free card given to seemingly racist police officers who used excessive force on Rodney King, a man who always seemed overwhelmed to have his identity become a household name.

I’d like to think that whoever smashed my car window while I was driving had perfect aim. He (or she) saw two white people and, in that moment, saw us as the enemy, wanting to shake us up but not physically harm us. I paid close attention to all the news coverage on the riots and not much was said about Venice so perhaps that smashed window, as traumatizing as it was to me, somehow proved cathartic to the perpetrator. It’s easy to paint the majority with a single broad brushstroke. A derisive “white people” reference representing the clear chasm between Us versus Them. I’ve seen gays do it often in their own circles, mocking, bemoaning and dismissing Heteros or Breeders. The more oppressed a minority feels and the more news events that underscore that sense of oppression, the greater the divide seems.

I get it. To the extent I can as an aging, pasty, white man who moved back to Canada after events like the Northridge earthquake and, yes, the Rodney King riots made L.A. feel inhospitable. I wish I’d had more courage then. I wish I’d had some sense of how I could do something to contribute to meaningful change. (But, still, that earthquake spooked me aplenty!)

Back to my walk to and from the Vancouver Art Gallery Sunday night. I walked slowly, only getting a block before I sensed that any protest had ended. I watched small groups of young people amble down Granville, nobody looting. A triad—one Black, one brown, one white—hung their arms over one another with a sense of coronavirus invincibility and took a selfie. A Black woman walked into a 7-Eleven as her Black and white friends called out soft drink orders. A group of young guys speaking Arabic hung close together and ducked into a cannabis store. A white woman crouched on the pavement and scrawled Black Lives Matter in pink chalk. I made the assumption that all of them were walking back home or to a transit station after the rally. Everybody appeared calm and satisfied. They had shown up. They had listened. They had made some noise. They had felt empowered and validated in a crowd I can only hope was socially distanced.

I haven’t figured out my role. It’s easy to like and retweet other people’s powerful tweets. More than anything, I hope the “noise” from the vandalism and looting gives way as thoughtful protests and political activism increase.

I’ve seen it written in many places that change has come relatively quickly in the LGBTQ movement, great strides made in the last half century. Sure, there’s more to do, but the progress is striking. Alas, true equality, acceptance and understanding of Blacks, Latinos and Muslims seems to be a loftier goal for whatever reason. It’s why efforts must be unrelenting in striving to allow minority voices to be heard in politics, in business, in entertainment, in education and in healthcare. I yearn to listen and to better understand. I long for a time when regular Black men like Rodney King, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd can live full, normal lives, when police situations don’t come with a fear for one’s life and when society can finally relish the richness of the diverse fabrics upon which it is made.

So often it has to get worse before it gets better. Let this be the final low. Please let progress begin. Let freedom finally ring.