One More River to Cross: Black and Gay in America FROM THE PUBLISHER
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.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Boykin, who is black and gay, came out of the closet in 1991 at age 25 while attending Harvard Law School, then went on to serve as special media assistant to President Clinton (1993-1994) as a liaison with the African American and homosexual communities. His important, bridge-building report stakes out common ground between blacks and gays, who share a burden of fighting oppression, negative stereotypes and internalized self-hatred. Boykin discovered an enormous amount of denialboth by heterosexual blacks who deny the existence of large numbers of black lesbians and gays, and by the white homosexual community, which, he says, excludes or patronizes African Americans, minimizing their contributions to the gay political movement and reinforcing straight society's prejudice. He constructively airs such issues as the black community's failure to address AIDS-related problems, the hostility gay interracial couples face, and the pervasive silence and denial concerning homosexuality by both Christian and Muslim ministers and congregations. Boykin is executive director of the National Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum. (Sept.)
Library Journal
Political activist Boykin records the experiences of black lesbians and gay men in this report, exploring their interactions with the white gay and straight black communities. (LJ 10/15/96)
Randall Kenan - The Advocate
One More River to Cross does an admirable job of cataloguing the issues and dynamics that affect African-Americans of the same-sex-orientation vein. Boykin, who is the executive director of the Black Gay and Leadership Forum, hits or at least glances off all the topics involved with being black and gay of lesbian. It's a damned difficult task. Yet One More River to Cross is nothing if not lucid.
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