Like I wrote in the previous post, The New Gay will publish the piece I wrote for them sometime in the near future (hopefully I didn't fill the piece with grammatical errors--again), in the meantime I was able to finish the other piece I said I was working on, Revisiting "Gay is the New Black", a bit early.

The piece itself is shorter than I wanted, but I was able to flush out all of the ideas that I wanted to so I'm content, plus I was not under any pressure to make the piece a certain length.

It is clear that the issue of ethnicity and its role in the Queer community has come once again to the forefront of my mind, which I am rather glad to have be the case since it is one of my favorite topics to write about; and I am fortunate that I have come across a lot of materials--thanks to Queerty--about the very topic. So probably the next piece I am going to write about will be about the lack of visibility of African-Americans in particular in the queer community.

A lot of people have suggested that it is because African-Americans are by and large closeted and want to have the White gay community do the work for them. When I heard that I got very upset, and while there is no dispute that African-American men have developed an intricate closet subculture, there are a lot of out and open Queer Africans-Americans and organizations that do a lot of work, but not get the recognition from the establish gay press as they should. But I'll get to more of that later.

I'm going to try and get a couple of other pieces out before I go on vacation on Thursday; however, I will just have to see how far I get with that.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from the current final draft of Revisiting "Gay is the New Black":

Last December Advocate magazine ran a cover that caused some controversy throughout the queer community about the status of queer rights in America. It was immediately after Prop 8 passed in California and many people had begun to look at the totality of progress and setbacks as it relates to queer rights over the years and wondered if queer-rights would the civil rights issue of our generation. The cover story was rather simply but yet profound, "Gay is the New Black: The Last Great Civil Rights Struggle" [...]

[...]It did not take long for reactions to pour in from all corners of the queer community. Some unequivocally said, "yes"; while others expressed some hesitation with what the title was alluding to. And then there were some that criticized the title for suggesting the idea that the plight of African-Americans for equality was over--after all as some would argue candidate Obama's election as President confirmed it--and we as a country could move on to the final frontier, queer-rights.[...]

[...]One thing that seemed obvious, even to those that disagreed with the rhetoric of the title, was that queer-rights had moved to the front burner across the country and in the nation's capital. What would previously had been a trump card for social-conservatives to pull out during tough campaigns, such as the Bush versus Kerry campaigns in 2004, had now become a topic at the forefront in many state legislatures and ballots, the national press, the halls of the Pentagon, and the floor of the United States Congress more so than ever before. And it has since only intensified and shown no sign of retreating into obscurity. [...]

[...]Culturally the nation is changing faster than the establishment in the capital can adjust. Americans across the board have been exposed to the lives and experiences of Queer-Americans. Queer people are no longer portrayed as the sexually ambiguous characters like Uncle Arthur from Bewitched the menacing homosexual figure from the 1960s PSA Boys Beware of the Homosexual. Many Americans now know of a queer person, whether at the work place, as a relative, or as a friend; and as a result have become aware of the struggles Queer-Americans and families must go through.