[..] I would be among the first to say that the gay experience anywhere in the world bears no resemblance to the black experience in twentieth century America. [..]
This is true: unlike the black minority in a white-dominated society, homosexuals are
not visible at the first glance. This entails quite different strategies for both discrimination and survival. A member of the oppressed black minority has no difficulties to recognize his likes, neither tends he to deny his identity (which were not possible anyway). He can find help and assistence among his relatives, but is harrased and kept down when he enters the public space. Our experiences are quite the other way: homosexuals can easily disguise themselves and access all the benefits in the public space, as long as they stay closeted, and by coming out homosexuals very often loose support and assistance of their families and previously close friends.
Also the strategies for cultural progress, along with developement and heritage of cultural identity and values, are very different. Where the ethnic minorities can raise and educate their youth properly from the baby age, we are confronted with waste masses of gay individuals knowing nothing about gay history as a people, and often damaged by more or less intense psychological mistreatments. Every year of non-understood sexuality and missing contact to the gay cultural community is a lost year for any homosexual individual, the political developement may take additional decades.
[..] Nationalism, however, and the arising need for it, is quite a different matter.
In the first part of the his speech, Malcolm X effectively depicts the very nature of the modern nationalism: it is not about to "teach people hate others", but rather about teaching people to respect themselves.
"The political philosophy of Black Nationalism only means that the black man should control the politics and the politicians in his own community. [..] Black nationalism is a self-help philosophy. [..] This is a philosophy that eliminates the necessity for division and argument. 'Cause if you are black you should be thinking black, and if you are black and you not thinking black at this late date, well I’m sorry for you."He also mentions a problem of internal discord and quarrel, a problem which appeared to me before as a particularly inherent to the gay community; now I know better. He describes the situation as follows:
"They don’t hang you because you’re a Baptist; they hang you 'cause you’re black. [..] We’re all in the same bag, in the same boat. We suffer political oppression, economic exploitation, and social degradation -- all of them from the same enemy. [..] So, I say in my conclusion the only way we're going to solve it – we’ve got to unite in unity and harmony, and black nationalism is the key. How we gonna overcome the tendency to be at each others throats that always exists in our neighborhoods? And the reason this tendency exists, the strategy of the white man has always been divide and conquer. [..] He tells you I’m for separation and you for integration to keep us fighting with each other. No, I’m not for separation and you’re not for integration. What you and I is for is freedom. Only you think that integration would get you freedom, I think separation would get me freedom. We both got the same objective, we just got different ways of getting at it."I could proceed with citations, but it is of nor more use than simply read the speech and draw analogies about the sense and usefullness of constructive nationalism.
There`s one place in Malcom X`s discourse where I immediately recognized myself.That sentence where he says that the white man had made the mistake of letting him read his history books.I have been myself a voracious reader of history books since my early teens.That`s where I got the idea that we gays could also secede.
History is a gorgeous thing, isn't it? Provided, one is able to understand analogies and draw the right conclusions.
