Description

Proclaiming their mission as “a simple matter of justice, ” the organizers of the 1993 March on Washington for lesbian and gay rights consciously paralleled Martin Luther King’s historic 1963 March on Washington. In response, black leaders and ministers across the country challenged any comparison between blacks and gays as offensive and irrational. In One More River to Cross, Keith Boykin takes us on a journey into this controversy by offering a window onto what it means to be both black and gay in America. Against a historical backdrop of civil rights and the black experience, Boykin interviews Baptist ministers, gay political leaders, and other black lesbians and gay men on issues of faith, family, discrimination, and visibility to determine what differences – real and imagined – separate the two communities. By portraying the “common ground” lives of everyday black gay people, Boykin dispels the myths that homosexuality is a “white thang” and that blacks are more homophobic than whites. With stories from his own experience as well as from other black lesbians and gay men, Boykin targets gay racism and black homophobia and suggests that conservative forces have substituted the common language of racism for homophobia in order to prevent a potentially powerful coalition of blacks and gays. The river we all face as Americans is prejudice, against whose current we must defend our democratic ideals of equality and opportunity. Will we cross this river together, Boykin asks? Or will we be divided by the forces of hate and fear? In One More River to Cross, Boykin reveals the necessity of this journey as well as the promise of the other side.