You move(d) in pretty elevated circles, nel; don't you think that any gathering of large donors to anything is likely to be predominantly white and male? I'm not saying that's how it should be, but it seems to be how it is in many causes, from gay rights to political parties to the symphony guild.nerdanel wrote:A more cynical take on this is that the public face of the gay rights movement has been disproportionately white, male, and much of the time white and male - which has served the movement very, very well in popularizing and humanizing its cause. In large part due to the socioeconomic advantages and professional standing that the white, male, and white male demographics within the gay community enjoy, the gay rights movement has attracted a landslide of corporate support that has further advanced its objectives. (As one illustration, I used to belong to the Human Rights Campaign's Federal Club, which with their Federal Club Council, is their circle of high-end donors who make substantial contributions and receive invitations to exclusive Federal Club-only events with other high donors. If they had an event with 100 individuals, approximately 85-90 of those would be white gay men, 10 of the remainder would be white OR male (i.e. gay men of color or white lesbian women, more of the former than the latter), and only the meager remainder would be women of color. Between gender, ethnicity, and age, I stood out like a very sore thumb. I think it's fair to say that at most or all of the events I attended, I was the only (then) lesbian-identified woman of color in my 20s present.)Primula Baggins wrote:One difference is time and culture marching on, but I suspect another is that most people in the 1960s didn't have the experience of suddenly discovering that people they knew well and cared about had actually been nonwhite for all those years.
Let's be real: if the dominant public face of the gay rights movement was gender nonconforming women of color and of moderate means, does one single person think that the battle for marriage equality would have moved so far and so fast?
The gay people who have been my friends for years, whose kids played with my kids, who worked on choir newsletters with me, etc., are almost all women of moderate means. White women, but this is Oregon, one of the whitest states there is because of our shameful history of sundown laws last century. The kind of acculturation I'm talking about has happened at PTA meetings, on the sidelines at soccer games, at church, at neighborhood potlucks. That's where people who firmly believed they didn't know anyone who was gay have met gay people and families with gay parents and realized that they are people like everyone else.
And can only be enriched by the people coming into it now who have deeply wanted it for a long time and fought hard for their right to it to be recognized.
