Groups encourage black LGBT political leadership

While Cambridge can boast of having had two successive African American, openly gay mayors, the reality is that there are just a handful of out black elected officials in the United States. Just last week for instance, Connecticut state Rep. Jason Bartlett came out publicly, making him the very first black, openly gay state legislator in the country. The dearth of openly gay African American elected officials has led the Gay and Lesbian Leadership Institute (GLLI) - the educational and research arm of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund - to partner with the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS) in an effort to boost the numbers of gay black political leaders.

The two organizations have created the Bayard Rustin Award, which will honor outstanding contributions to the field of research on the topic of LGBT African Americans in electoral politics. NCOBPS will hand out the inaugural cash prize to the award winner at its annual conference in 2009.

The award is named for Bayard Rustin, the openly gay, African American civil rights leader who helped organize the 1963 March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have A Dream Speech." Rustin was relegated to a behind-the-scenes role in the civil rights movement after opponents attempted to use his sexual orientation to discredit the movement.
Denis Dison, vice president of communications for the GLLI and the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, said the creation of the award is part of a trend in the LGBT movement toward diversity."There are a lot of organizations with a lot of staff that is pretty white," Dison observed. "And I think that all of us in the movement are looking for ways to not only diversify our leadership but diversify the constituencies that we serve." While the number of openly gay elected officeholders who are people of color is a respectable 11 percent of the 410 out officials currently serving across the country, Dison noted that few of them are African American. "As one of the major minority groups in the country, they're really underrepresented," he said.
Dison is hopeful that the award will encourage research into identifying possible barriers for black LGBT candidates.

"I think one of the things that will be interesting to see is if we see research coming out of this that just measures attitudes in the black gay community about whether or not they're being represented, whether or not they participate in the electoral process and if they don't, why not and if they do, what draws them into that, what barriers do they see," he said. Right now, he said, there is no such data.

Though he works for an organization whose mission is to help elect openly LGBT candidates, Dison said he has no theories on why there are so few black gay elected officials. "I've heard theories that it is harder to be openly LGBT in the African American power structure and I don't know whether that's the case or not," said Dison. "But if it is we need to figure out what those barriers are and then work at resolving that."

In the meantime, the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund is partnering with the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC) to present a first-ever candidate campaign training aimed specifically at people of color.

"We've moderated what we normaly do on our candidate campaign training to include perspectives from African American political professionals and others who can come in and train folks on how to run [and] really answering the question of whether there are special issues if you're openly gay and black and you're running that need to be addressed if you decide to take on a campaign or run yourself."