blacksnextdoor

As I write this, I’m sitting in front of my fireplace. There’s a fire gently crackling. I’m wrapped in a prickly Berber blanket and sipping a cup of mint tea. It’s rare that I’m this laid back on a Sunday afternoon with all the pressure of Monday morning looming but I’m making a concerted effort to distance myself from it all in light of how excessively charged November’s been. Barack won. Good.

I’ve been avoiding watching news shows as much as I’m able, though Friday morning while rushing into my bedroom from the shower, I caught a glimpse of The Pregnant Man on Good Morning America and was instantly sucked into the familiar screenshot of a pregnant and shirtless man. For me, at least, and I’m sorry if this offends anyone — it was like sighting the Loch Ness Monster for a second time.

Apparently anyway, The Pregnant Man is pregnant again and Barbara Walters was thus delivering some teaser for a longer piece on The Pregnant Man that would air later. She refers to time spent with The Pregnant Man, his wife and their first child, showing clips of them at home that present them as average people doing average things. At one point, the pregnant man explains that even though he is a man, he has the reproductive capacity of a woman. I can’t even begin to describe the bizarre psycho-sexual odyssey I am taken on. Maybe you saw it too and I don’t have to.

Anyway, I kept wondering if my favorite aunt and the heroic blacks of the great Civil Rights era who had marched and protested in behalf of equality could have forecasted they’d one day be passing on the torch to not another African American, but the Pregnant Man.

Unlike Barbara Walters, I find it impossible to get all teary eyed over The Pregnant Man because I don’t believe gender reassignment anymore than plastic surgery resolves issues of self image and development except cosmetically. The Pregnant Man is clearly just a bearded woman as far as I’m able to follow which is not a big deal if we leave it there.

I’ve noticed the option to select the gender of our children — at the level of the fetus, is something more and more families are requesting which I’m also not crazy about. In certain areas of the world, parts of Asia, where male children are preferred over female, doctors who offer this medical option market their services heavily.  And looking ahead, there will be all kinds of increasing options, surgical and biotechnological that will enable a larger and larger gray area between natural and artificial life. Hopefully, it’s not perceived as bigoted to not wholeheartedly include all this under an instant civil rights umbrella in light of the matters of faith, ethics, and the law that these innovations in humankind so boldly challenge. 

That said, midweek I read William Saletan’s piece in The Root, http://www.root.com on Proposition 8. Thumbnail sketch: Black voters are a big reason why gay marriage was voted down in Cali. Also browsed Jasmyne A Cannick’s moving piece in the LA Times. African Americans are analyzed as unable to back gay marriage for all kinds of reasons. The extremely conservative message of the black church is one. Another is the gay movement’s inherent whiteness.

I agree with Jasmyne (http://www.jasmynecannick.com is an awesome site by the way) when she said that black voters had more basic issues to focus on than whether same sex couples could marry but I’m worried about black people as voters on training wheels. If our churches and mosques are delivering a dogmatically anti-gay message that keeps the gay members of our community — including our very family members — disenfranchised and ultimately enables AIDS to spread through our ranks to the extent that it is, where are we going here? What are we doing?

I like many of us, have young people in my family whose lives can take any direction personally and I would like to think that regardless, they will always be welcome on my couch to share the warmth of this fire and have a cup of tea. I’m sure that most African Americans can relate to this kind of hospitality, a hospitality which in some ways characterizes us. But the time has come to go beyond smiles and cups of tea. Time for gay people to come on board full blown. Job benefits, right to marry, adopt. Full stop. And for African Americans to politically support this.

As for The Pregnant Man: Too closely associating gay rights with the extreme experiment in human retooling that is The Pregnant Man and other characters this outrageous if there are any — will keep African American voters in a conservative holding pattern on the subject of gay rights — which may work out very well for the Republicans as they scramble to diversify…