Dezey and the World of Tomorrow

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Disparity

This is "Dezey." He's not fond of giving people with cameras and notepads his first and last name. I think I understand why. More on that later.


I had the pleasure of meeting Dezey at the The Ruth Ellis Center in Highland Park(1). The Center sits inside a nondescript concrete box on a nondescript concrete block within throwing distance of a nondescript former factory where Henry Ford built a machine that changed the world.

In symmetry with that factory, the Ruth Ellis Center is also engaged in a monumental bit of manufacturing. As the only organization in the Midwest dedicated to residential and drop-in services for runaway, homeless, and otherwise at-risk LGBTQ(2) youth, the Ruth Ellis Center manufactures emotional and physical sanctuary for kids hard-pressed to find it anywhere else (Laura Hughes is the center's executive director. She was nice enough to arrange a meeting between me, Dezey, and a couple of other participants at the center).

The ostracization faced by gay teens has staked a visible perch in both pop culture and academic research. In 2010, sex advice columnist Dan Savage and his partner Terry Miller recorded a video message to gay teens. In the video, Dan and Terry promised LGBTQ teens that if they could outlast the alienation, ridicule, and bullying they faced today, there were better days on the other side of 18. That message became the catalyst for the It Gets Better video series. According to the project's website, the series has since been viewed by 40 million people and features videos from 40,000 contributors including President Barack Obama.  


In parallel with pop phenomena like the It Gets Better campaign, the plight of LGBTQ teens figures prominently in academic research. A 2011 report from the Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that 4 percent of the U.S. population identifies as gay, bisexual, or transgender. Based on their representation in the population, we would expect LGBTQ teens to be about 20 times less likely to be homeless. Instead, compared to their heterosexual counterparts, gay teens are 2 times more likely to be homeless(3). When teens come out of the closet they quite frequently are put out of the house.

It should come as no surprise to anyone with a computer, smartphone, tablet, or pair of reading glasses that gay teens are alienated in mainstream American society. What is surprising, is the way gay teens are marginalized in a historically marginalized community. One would expect that members of one marginalized group, would empathize with and embrace members of another marginalized group. One would be disappointed. While LGBTQ people are ostracized in larger American society, they are especially alienated in the black community.

A 2010 Pew Research Center poll shows that only 30 percent of black Americans support gay marriage (compared to 44 percent of white Americans). It would be reasonable to say an unfavorable opinion of a gay marriage does not necessarily indicate an unfavorable opinion of homosexuality in general - except when it does.  In a 2008 Gallup poll, only 31 percent of black Democrats indicated that they believed homosexuality was morally acceptable (compared with 61 percent of non-black Democrats).

Homophobia is undeniably a problem in America. It's even more of a problem in black America. 


Why? 

Causes

Environment
Highland Park is by any definition of the term, a low-income inner city community. Low-income inner city communities tend to have higher rates of violence than non low-income inner-city communities. To avoid victimization, many young men in these kinds of neighborhoods quickly embrace a posture where anger and disregard are the only emotions fit for public display.

This posturing leads to a hyper-aversion to anything that is not explicitly confrontational and violent.  Not only is having sex with another man "gay," so is reading books and smiling when you are happy. Any person who dares to be in any way effusive or express himself in a way that is out of line with their apparent gender, risks alienation, ridicule or worse. 


Religiosity
Black Americans - more so than any other major American ethnic group -  are indisputably very religious and very Christian.  According to a report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 79 percent of black Americans list religion as playing a "very important" role in their lives (compared to 56 percent of all American adults).  That same report shows more than 85 percent of black Americans identify as belonging to one sect of Christianity or another. That number is even larger if you include other Bible-based faith traditions like Islam and Judaism.

So, what does the Bible have to say about homosexuality? It says God wants them dead:

"If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads." 

                                                                - Leviticus 20:13

In the interest of brevity, I'll just post one example of how much God really, really wants to kill gay people. If you'd like, you can see more examples here curated by a person who is critical of the Bible's homophobia or here by a person who isn't critical of the Bible's homophobia at all. In total, there are a dozen or so places in the Bible were God calls for violence against gays.  Sort of makes you wonder if God lives in the inner city part of Heaven.


Now, if you feel compelled to leave a comment about how these verses are taken out of context or misinterpreted, let me offer some advice: First, slap yourself in the face. Next, don't. It's not taken out of context. Its not a matter of interpretation. This is what the book says. 


Whether or not the Bible is homophobic is not up for debate. It is. What does bear exploration is the interplay between black religiosity and black homophobia.

Black people love the Bible, the Bible hates gay people - which leads black people to... exactly. A disproportionate commitment to a religion that hates gay people, largely accounts for black folk's disproportionate hatred of gays.  Can you blame them? They are simply taking cues from the Divine Creator of the Universe.

With this cultural climate in mind, I can imagine a dozens reasons why Dezey was hesitant to give me his full name. In an environment so wrought with homophobia, it would seem smart to be suspicious of all straights - even disarmingly witty, shockingly handsome,  scuba-certified, hot air balloon pilot,  ex-CIA, photographer/essayists.

Resolution
[in 500 words or less]

Historically, hatred in America has been unidirectional.  For the most part(4), Americans of European descent have done the hating and everyone else has done the being hated. All along, civil rights leaders, moral philosophers, and (most recently) scientists have argued that black Americans were the equal of their white brethren. And they were right. Equally malicious.

You see, as it turns out, black people are made of the same DNA stuff as all other kinds of people. Not only are so-called black people as capable of all the lofty imagination, creativity, and intellectual endeavor as any other kind of human; they are also as prone to the vicious hierarchical tribalism that defines us as a species. Given the opportunity, black Americans are as given to oppress as anyone else. 

This dynamic can be hard to appreciate viewed through the porthole of race relations in North American. Given that paradigm, it's easy to imagine black Americans solely as the noble, long-suffering victims of European oppressors.  However, if you zoom out and press rewind, its easier to see that people of European descent have no special monopoly on oppressiveness. When my Afrocentric friends pridefully regal me with tales of the great African empires of Dahomey or Mandingo, I always ask: "How do you think those African empires acquired land and resources?"

By oppressing the shit out of anyone who opposed them, that's how. 

Ideally, the discussion of equity in America would be informed by an understanding that all humans have a propensity toward oppressiveness. With that understanding, inequitable behavior would be criticized no matter who perpetrated it.

Instead, when historically oppressed groups enact inequities, we treat them with kid gloves. Perhaps it's because we feel guilty about the historical oppression faced by these groups. Perhaps it's because would-be critics fear being mislabeled a racist.

However, failing to call a wrong a wrong, ultimately only allows a wrong to persist. If an ideology emerges that calls for the death of a people, it should be properly identified as a morally reprehensible threat to civil society. It should be ridiculed, reviled, and shunned by people of good conscience - no matter if its Mein Kampf or the Old Testament. 

If we criticize white racism, we should  just as enthusiastically criticize black homophobia.

If we hope to continue humankind's ascent toward increasingly equitable societies, we have to vehemently and vocally oppose all backward ideologies. By doing so, we take a step closer to a society where we know Dezey's first and last name. 

 - Noah -

Noah Stephens founded The People of Detroit in April 2010 as a counterpoint to media fixated on despair and disrepair in the storied birthplace of American auto manufacturing. Since, TPOD has received national and international attention. Portraits from the project have appeared in Bloomberg BusinessWeek and other national publications. In early 2011, a creative director saw the project online and hired Noah to shoot an ad campaign for McDonald's Corporation in Shanghai, China. 

The People of Detroit Photodocumentary is funded in part by a grant from CEOS for Cities and the John S. And James L. Knight Foundation.

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1. A 91 percent black, working-class municipality peculiarly located within the boundaries of Detroit. Highland Park is also the city where I was raised.

2. Defined by the Center as "Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Attractional, Transgender and Questioning"

3. http://www.safeschoolscoalition.org/LGBTQhomelessFactSheetbyNAEH.pdf
4. While Anglo-Americans discriminated against non-Anglo white ethnic groups (Irish- and Italian-Americans, for example) for much of American history; that schism has been largely ameliorated as white ethnic minorities have been subsumed into a larger, "white American" identity.