Dr. Tanis Starck, Director of the Office of Intercultural Relations at San Diego State University, who also is Black, says that she works with the LGBT community and understands its struggles.
“To have [African-American] struggles be looked at as a model, in a positive light, for fighting for rights [is good]. Even though the circumstances are different, I don’t find it [a negative] that the LGBT Civil Rights movement mirrors the Black Civil Rights movement,” she said.
Marriage equality supporters Teri McClain, l, and Mary Beth Brotski stand with signs supporting President Barack Obama outside a fundraising event for the president, Thursday, May 10, 2012, in Seattle. /AP Photo/Elaine Thompson
“People don’t know the stories that may have happened when the LGBT community began to start walking for their rights,” Starck said. “The Black community and the [LGBT] community should be embracing one another, sharing similar struggles and offering support for one another.”
Bond wrote previously in an EBONY magazine essay that “we ought to be flattered that our movement has provided so much inspiration for others, that it has been so widely imitated, and that our tactics, methods, heroines and heroes, even our songs, have been appropriated by or served as models for others.”
“I don’t know if sharing a sexual orientation is sufficient to bind people into common political orientation,” Bond said. “I hope it is, but I’m not sure it is.”
Looking toward the Presidential election, Americans and politicians will have to watch and see.//
To read the second article in this series about the Latino community, click here.
