To grow up in the closet is to grow up as someone else. My trauma response, protecting myself, is to shy away from that or diminish that part of myself because history showed me if I don’t diminish myself, it will be diminished for me.” But I also realize that’s not how everyone thinks. “I’ve been … to a lot of places growing up in the South, growing up where I heard people from that generation saying disparaging things about queer people. Angela Davis, who is still alive, unless she is saying it herself, her queerness gets erased from these movements as well. “Being raised in the South and seeing how Bayard Rustin and James Baldwin were essentially erased - not erased - but their queerness seem to be erased from their context in regards to the civil rights movement so you think their queerness must be a bad thing,” he told me. Surprisingly Bob, who is Black, didn’t have a problem connecting to their stories because he is gay. to the principles of nonviolence and organized the March on Washington, they would see how nonsensical Chappelle’s us-versus-them brand of humor really is.ĭuring the “Selma” episode of “We’re Here,” one of the hosts, Bob the Drag Queen, broke down in tears as he spoke with Bloody Sunday survivors. Maybe if more people knew that Bayard Rustin, an openly queer Black man, introduced the Rev. I could go on, but I think you get the picture. Most of the trans people killed and their deaths ignored? Black. Speaking of which, when “don’t ask, don’t tell” was forcing queer people out of the military, robbing them of their careers, no group was hurt more by this policy than Black women. And not just queer men.īlack women account for nearly 60% of new HIV cases among women. In his new Netflix special, when he said the rapper DaBaby, who has been criticized for homophobic comments, “punched the LGBTQ community right in the AIDS,” Chappelle could have easily subbed out “LGBTQ” for “Black” because no group contracts or dies from the virus more than Black people. But when it comes to intersectionality he has painfully glaring blind spots - continuing to tell jokes about the rainbow through a prism of black and white.
Now, I happen to think Chappelle is one of the most brilliant comedians to ever pick up a microphone. Or in Dave Chappelle’s case, the retelling of jokes.
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In fact, it wasn’t until seeing the “Selma” episode of the HBO series - which begins its second season on Monday in time for National Coming Out Day - that I became aware of how much I had accepted the lack of intersectionality in the retelling of our times.
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It wasn’t until I watched screeners from season 2 of the Emmy-nominated reality TV show “We’re Here” that I became aware of some of the ways I subconsciously contribute to my own queer erasure. Or that some of the residents who currently live in this historic town are. You know, in all of the years I’ve visited, watched documentaries and followed news coverage of civil rights activists crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in observance of Bloody Sunday, it had never occurred to me that some of the foot soldiers in 1965 were queer.