Last Sunday, Duanna Johnson, a transgender woman was found murdered in Memphis. Back in February she was brutally beaten by a Memphis police officer for refusing to respond to his transphobic taunting.

The report in Angry Brown Butch points out the discrepancy between the attention given to Duanna Johnson and that of Prop 8.

Yet still, the disparity in attention is damn stark. And that skew isn’t limited to this particular incident; it is a skew that is present in the collective coverage of and attention paid to all violence against trans women of color. And it is a skew that reflects what the GLb(t) mainstream chosen to prioritize with time, energy, and resources, and what it has chosen to address primarily with lip service and leftovers. An apt example of this: the Prop 8 op-ed written by Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solmonese communicates more anger, more commitment to an enduring fight for justice, more of a sense of giving a damn than his brief, comparatively tepid statement in HRC press release on Duanna Johnson’s death…..Continue reading

The family of Duanna Johnson need financial support for her funeral. For more information see here.

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Duanna Johnson
Transgender
Transwoman
LGBTI
Transphobia

Anyone regularly reading this blog will by now have a fairly good idea of the long hard struggle faced by the African LGBTI community against homophobic bigots, even in South African where LGBTI rights are enshrined in the constitution and where same-sex marriage became a reality in 2006. However we often imagine that things are much easier in the US and I guess relatively they are but there the recent passing of Proposition 8 [a constitutional amendment in California which bans same-sex marriage] is a wake up call that all is far from being OK.

The title of this post comes from Pam’s House Blend who thought of using the word “hysterical” but thought it “too serious a topic for snark“. But that depends how you interpret the word “hysterical” - as in “hysterically roll on the floor funny”or as in “hysterical psychoneurotic - marked by excessive or uncontrollable emotion - mad frenzied raving; “a mob of hysterical vigilantes”. Taking this interpretation the use of the word is very appropriate.

The passing of the amendment was not just because Black voters supported it but they did have a considerable part to play[to make this point clear it should read “relative to their numbers and percentage vote*“] and we as Black people need to step up and own up to the homophobia in our communities whether here in England or Nigeria, Uganda or the US. And as Pam writes it’s not just Prop 8…..

It’s been an strange month to be black and gay in America so far. First there was the gay bashing that killed Michael Sandy in New York, and the disturbing news of Tyrone Garner’s lack of a burial 37 days after his death with the possibility of a pauper’s burial in the end. Those depressing stories were balanced out somewhat yesterday by the news of the New Jersey Supreme Court decision and the fact that a black lesbian couple was among the plaintiffs whose willingness to take a stand yielded that historic moment.

Pam’s hard-line response to the “hysterical” bigots amongst Black people is powerful and particularly addresses the religious bigots that we all know too well in African countries.

When I was growing up, I heard an old legend that if you read the Bible all the way through from beginning to end, it would make you crazy. Now I think what makes you crazy isn’t reading the Bible, but reading it literally and to the exclusion of anything else. That will drive you insane as surely as sitting in a dark room and never allowing any light to enter it would make anyone insane. Let in a little light, and you see enough to make things out. More light than that, and suddenly the way you thought the world around you worked doesn’t make sense anymore. But not enough light and you either have to create stories to explain what you can’t fully see. Or you have to just not see it. With African Americans, it began with the first slaves who were converted to Christianity only to be confronted with the biblical passages that justified and even sanctified their enslavement, and for the sake of sanity had to “not read those parts.”

Also note that in the US like Nigeria, Uganda, Zimbabwe and other African countries, the bigotry stems from the same Victorian puritanical Christianity forced fed on Africans by the colonial rulers and speaks to the “unAfricanness” of Christianity itself. This was a religion brought by white people who claimed Black people were not human but savage animals to be controlled and fed literal interpretations of a bible that was used to confirm their sub-humanness.

I basically concur with his premise that the vehement homophobia expressed by many Blacks stems from a the history of so many Black slaves being converted to Christianity by conservative denominations that stressed biblical literalism, strict Victorian sexual morality that was prevalent during the same period as American slavery, and a reaction against the stereotypes of Blacks as insatiable sexual savages.

We have all had to put up with being at best marginalised and worse excluded and disowned by families, friends and community or forced to live in open and closed closets of hurt and anger. Coming from our own people who have been oppressed and treated like crap for the best part of 500 years - is particularly hard to take. How can people who have been through so much pain because of their Blackness then turn around and inflict the same pain on their sisters and brothers just because they have a different sexual orientation? It is shameful. Black people all over the world are celebrating the fact that a Black man has become President of the US and therefore the most powerful person in the world. Yet they cannot even begin to connect the dots and link that up with their own homophobia they are so blinded with the ink from their bibles.

*Updated with clarification

Technorati: Proposition 8 + USA LGBTI Homophobia

This essay by Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán makes the link between civil rights and marriage equality with a plea for voters in three US state, California, Florida and Arizonia to vote against amendments which would outlaw same gender marriage. Although directly addressing people in the US, Timoteo Bodhran words speak to those in Africa and elsewhere who continue to deny the existence of same gender loving people and the right to “same gender marriage equality”

We remember that our ancestors, Indigenous, African, and immigrant were enslaved and denied through various laws the right to marry, because we were seen as unhuman, heathens, merely property and labor.

We remember that our ancestors were denied entry into the country and residence in the country as full families due to xenophobic laws that only wanted single workers that would stay temporarily and be worked to death.

We remember that until 1967, in various parts of the U.S. it was illegal for our multiracial ancestors to legally marry, due to anti-miscegenation laws that tried to keep white blood pure, white wealth separate, and to prevent our communities of color from working together, with each other, and with anti-racist whites.

We remember how our traditional honoring of relationships and ways of forming extended, women-led, and same gender families were outlawed, killed, written out of our memories by racist laws.

And we remember the millions of families ripped apart by war, genocide, boarding schools, colonial occupation of our landbase, and enslavement………Continued

Links

Bigotry disguised as religious truth

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Same Sex Marriage
LGBTI

“The Troy Davis case involves Troy Anthony Davis, an American sports coach, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1989 murder of a Savannah, Georgia police officer, Mark Allen MacPhail, solely on the basis of eyewitness testimony.^[1] Seven of nine witnesses later recanted their testimony, but he has been unable to get a new trial. Amnesty International, Pope Benedict XVI and others have appealed against his sentence, contributing twice to the sentence being stayed temporarily. However, in October 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Davis’ last appeal. Davis’ execution date had been set for October 27, 2008, but was stayed on October 24 by a three-judge panel from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.^[2]”
[source…]

This is a complicated case because one man has been killed, and another is going to be killed. A family is bereaved and another is going to be bereaved. The logic is all wrong in feeling rage for the loss of a loved one and intending to make someone else feel rage for the loss of their loved one.

I am against killing people for whatever reason. There are a number of things capital punishment does not do, and one of them is bring back the dead person. Another one is satisfy the family of the dead person. Another is curb violent crime. And yet another is be safeguarded against errors liable to execute innocent people.

Troy Davis must be allowed to present his case, especially if there is new evidence. The witnesses who have recanted must be grilled, and those who haven’t recanted must be grilled as well, because a cloud of doubt hangs over whether this man is guilty or not. Is he guilty? I don’t know, and I’m willing to bet very few people know. That’s not enough to kill a man for.

My poem does not attempt to say that Troy is innocent. It tries to say he has not been proven guilty. Too many black people have been killed because someone had to pay, and they were there, black and disposable. That is why Troy must not be killed unless he’s proven guilty. And that is why I have written The Message.

THE MESSAGE
(for Troy Davis)

Over the outer walls
a sun is rising, lighting
the same things suns light
whether or not another war
has been sparked, or
a market dried up to die,
the same sun that sometimes
appears to linger above
land on which his mother
grows beans, collards, in soil
smeared with blood, cleared with toil.
It’ll be so heavy one might
mistake it for a low moon
on white picket fence
at this unusual hour,
the morning of his last day;
but a cock crows to tell the boy,
who has grown into a man,
it’s time to go. Elsewhere
in the country, a post-woman
slides letters into mailboxes
whose arms, too, hang loosely
at the sides. A dog scampers after
her jeep to the end of the street,
slinks back home dragging its tail.
It’s a day nobody is waiting for
nor thinks should shine. A day
Jehovah won’t forget easily.
A last day for a man who was a boy,
and through whose skin, silly
with melanocytes, past whose
layers of vein wall, and into
whose lumen, a needle will
go in and leave its message.
© Rethabile Masilo

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Brandon McClelland dragged to death in Paris Texas