D.L. Hughley and Prop 8

There’s a clip on the web of columnist Dan Savage’s appearance on D.L. Hughley’s CNN talk show, D.L. Hughley Breaks The News. I linked to it through my PlanetOut This Weekend email.

Mr. Savage, probably best known for the witty sex column Savage Love, was (of course) there to talk about Prop 8 and the angry accusation that black and Latino voters were responsible for the denial of gay marriage rights (and other LGBT rollbacks) on November 4th. I watched the clip twice—two and half times, actually—increasingly irritated by the way Hughley verbally danced all over the damn place, making one anti-gay statement after another and then immediately sort of taking it back, or not really meaning it, or something like that, talking out of both sides of his mouth as rapidly as humanly possible. “I’m not particularly homophobic” he says. Right, and then a moment later: “I don’t condone the gay lifestyle,” a slap he then he attempts to qualify with “I don’t condone the government being involved with people’s affairs.” Pick a position and stick with it a minute already!

And then Hughley did the utterly predictable thing: he started yammering on about how his homophobia-that-isn’t-really is natural and right because of, you know, the way he
was brought up and because of the church. YAWN. For Chrissake, can’t these Negroes be a little more original about their hostility to gays? Because of the way he was brought up? What exactly does that mean? I was brought up the way D.L. Hughley was brought up, so for that matter was Dan Savage. Basically, we were all raised in heterosexual households by heterosexual parents either oblivious or openly hostile to ways of living that strayed from what they’d been taught (by heterosexual parents in heterosexual households) was the acceptable norm. Religion, whether Christian or Jewish, played a significant part in the lives of our immediate and extended families. And whatever else we all grew up doing, we all grew up watching “Good Times” and “The Brady Bunch” and “The Jeffersons” and “The Partridge Family” or facsimiles thereof. I’m saying Dan Savage and I are from the same planet as D.L. Hughley—we weren’t hatched from eggs, we’re not pod people—and we’re gay. If Hughley’s “upbringing” explains his heterosexuality, not to say his homophobic clueless-ness, what explains Savage’s queerness? Or mine?

Remember the original Def Comedy Jam years? I do, in a vague, hung-over sort of way; I remember the seemingly endless parade of potty-mouthed brothas (and from time to time a sistah or two) doing stand-up comedy rants that, when they acknowledged the presence of gays in American life at all, usually did so with a sneer and an insult, the cheapest laugh of the night. Hughley was a part of that group, so was a host of others including Martin Lawrence, Cedric the Entertainer, Steve Harvey and the late, great Bernie Mac. And I laughed, and cringed, and finally stopped laughing, disheartened and bored, frankly, as finally one comic after another seemed mainly to be imitating Eddie Murphy, who in his own club routines seemed to be channeling Richard Pryor (himself not exactly the most enlightened entertainer regarding queer issues, his affection and admiration for Lily Tomlin notwithstanding).

I got so tired of being dissed and in such a spectacularly ignorant and complacent way--and from my own people. It still goes on and I’m still tired of it. I’m weary too of the thunderous silence from lesbian and gay celebs of color. Okay, yes, Wanda Sykes came out after Prop 8, but where’s… everybody else? I understand that black queers with any kind of public profile feel caught in a bind, wary of losing a hard-won success from racism on the one hand and community rejection on the other. Still, the silence is especially troubling to me because I think it sets in stone the meanness and myth that too often informs minority objections to gay rights, essentially guaranteeing that straights of color with such mindsets continue to view all things queer as a deliberate cultural assault on their values and religious beliefs. “I’ve never met a black atheist,” Hughley said to Savage and I just wanted to throw up. The hell you haven’t, I thought, snorting. You’ve met black atheists and agnostics, too. You’ve worked with them, you’ve partied with them, they’ve been members of your posse.

Oh, maybe they haven’t had the courage to own up, to come out of their own particular closets, but they’re there, trust me. It is—excuse me—a fairy tale, and a cherished one, that every single African-American is religious and/or believes in God no matter where they come from or how they were raised. The problem with that contention is that if we’re going to bridle at White America’s inclination to view blacks generally as threats or problems, if we insist white people recognize and respect that we are as diverse as any other racial or ethnic group, then by all laws of logic we’re obligated to do the same. Which also, Mr. Hughley, means admitting that there are gay, lesbian, bisexual and tranny African-Americans and other people of color who are—as Dan Savage attempted to point out to you—as disserved by Prop 8 as LGBT Caucasians.

“Ya gotta march a little while longer,” Hughley told Savage with a big, self-satisfied grin, before hurriedly shaking his hand and wishing him the best. Yes, well. I wonder if Mr. Hughley would have been quite as smug tossing that parting shot at the likes of a James Baldwin, Barbara Jordan or Bayard Rustin?