One More River to Cross - Hardcover

Boykin, Keith

4.05

59 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385479824 ISBN 13: 9780385479820

Publisher: Doubleday, 1996

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In organizing the 1993 March on Washington for gay and lesbian rights, leaders of the gay community consciously paralleled Martin Luther King's historic 1963 March on Washington and proclaimed their mission was "a simple matter of justice." 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 clarifies the relationship between blacks and gays in America by portraying the "common ground" lives of those who are both black and gay.

Against a historical backdrop of civil rights and the black experience in America, Boykin interviews Baptist ministers, gay political leaders, and other black gays and lesbians on issues of faith, family, discrimination, and visibility to determine what differences-- real and imagined-- separate the two communities. Boykin points to evidence of African and precolonial same-sex behavior, as well as figures like James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin, to dispel the myth that homosexuality is a "white thang," while his research suggests that blacks are less homophobic than whites, despite the rhetoric of rap and religion. With stories from his own experience as well as that of other black gays and lesbians, 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.

By portraying what it means to be black and gay in America, One More River to Cross offers an extraordinary window into a community that challenges this country's acceptance of its minorities, both racial and sexual.

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About the Author:

Keith Boykin is a CNN political commentator and a former White House aide to President Bill Clinton. Keith teaches politics at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York. He earned degrees from both Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, where he studied alongside former president Barack Obama. All four of his books have received nominations for Lambda Literary Awards. In 2013 his book, For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Still Not Enough, won the American Library Association Stonewall Award for Nonfiction.

From 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 denial?both 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.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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