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Photo By Jymi Bolden
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Things are not what they appear.
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That rainbow flag is a liar.
Scenario 1: A couple of black lesbians stood at the door to Bullfishes, the plaid-shirt-lumberjack-girl bar on Hamilton Avenue in Northside. The black women were clearly of legal drinking age. The white woman working the door carded them anyway. But not the white women before or after them.
Scenario 2: On June 9, 2001, during Gay Pride Weekend, the black-run lesbian group Prodigy Productions sponsored its one-year anniversary party at the Holiday Inn on West Eighth Street. When an elevator with several white lesbians stopped on the designated floor, the doors opened to a room filled with partying black lesbians. The white women stepped out cautiously, then turned back to the elevator and left as quickly as they arrived.
Scenario 3: Black gays and lesbians, seemingly powerless and apathetic, do little to combat overt racism.
Puttin' on the rainbow
Like other cities its size, Cincinnati suffers from a permissive brand of racism and classism that's trickled down and poisoned other factions within its communities to the point of intolerance.
No community within a society exists in a vacuum. Rather, that community is itself a reflection of society at large.
The violence and rage erupting after the shooting death of Timothy Thomas last April are symptomatic of the city's -- and the country's -- larger problems.
"The gay and lesbian community is just a reflection of America, period," says Dwight Kyles, a black professional who moved here in 1989 from Chicago. "Bars and clubs owned by white men are far more profitable than those run by blacks."
Kyles says Cincinnati's splintered gay and lesbian community mirrors the segregated city.
"Everything is basically like Cincinnati," he says. "All the multi-racial, multi-ethnic groups have disintegrated."
Prodigy Productions, formed in 2000 and now defunct, is a case in point. It was based on the premise that blacks -- particularly black lesbians -- shouldn't have to suffer humiliations like those at Bullfishes. They could support, and own, something more closely resembling themselves.
"It was because we found there were no African-American places to go and socialize," says Leu Hicks, a co-founder.
"Sisters were tired of giving their money to Europeans," says S. Bryant, another co-founder and Hicks' life partner. "Sisters were tired of being disrespected at places like Bullfishes."
Bryant and Hicks constantly battled black apathy and white resistance when they tried to host events and enter the mostly white, male inner sanctum of Cincinnati's gay political and social organizations.
When asked for their perceptions of Cincinnati's gay/ lesbian community, Hicks sums it up in one word: "Separated. Separate, but not equal, definitely."
"It's so closeted here, so closeted and hush-hush," says Bryant, a Pittsburgh native. "I just feel like Cincinnati is a place without any culture, no closeness. Just because you put on rainbows doesn't make you comfortable with being gay and doesn't make you 'out.' It's like they hide behind symbols."
Bryant says Hicks was unsuccessful in trying to get Prodigy "in that Stonewall loop."
"(Hicks) was really trying to show the mission statement, but there were no return phone calls, no response," she says. "Nothing."
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Photo By Jymi Bolden
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Queen for a day at Pipeline.
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Doreen Cudnik, formerly Stonewall Cincinnati's executive director and currently an organizer for the Contact Center, says Stonewall has in the past been guilty of being an exclusive organization catering to white gay men.
"The face of Stonewall has changed, and we want people to know that without a doubt we are an anti-racist organization," says Cudnik, who remains a board member after having her paid staff position eliminated in August 2001. "We need to be held accountable to that. How can we expect other groups to be at the table with us and in support of our issues if we're not at the table with them?
"We need to support each other when and where we can. There are a lot of common issues here."
If that sounds like a rendering of "Kum Ba Ya" fraught with damage control, that's because it is.
Stonewall(ed)
Early on Sept. 11, Americans reeled from terrorist attacks that forever altered perceptions of domestic safety. That same day in Cincinnati, some gay white men's perceptions of safety were also greatly altered.
Stonewall Cincinnati is the local chapter of the national human rights organization long perceived to be comprised of and run by politically and socially active white gay men. That changed at the chapter's Sept. 11 board meeting, when a number of women and minorities stormed the meeting demanding inclusion and change.
Dianna Brewer, youth director of the Unity House World Peace Center in Northside, had been dissatisfied with what she preceived as Stonewall's exclusivity. So she recruited other black lesbians to join her in applying to the organization's board.
They showed up en mass on Sept. 11 with applications in hand.
Brewer, a Louisville native, says Stonewall members later met to "consider" her application. Despite her doubts, nine new members were voted onto Stonewall's 12-member board -- including Brewer -- with three holdovers. Several Stonewall members who objected to the new board applications resigned when they were accepted.
It was a tumultuous night when her application was accepted, Brewer says.
"One guy could've just had his little Klan hat on -- it was written all over his face," she says. "He said, 'We want African Americans on the board, but we don't want people who disagree with us right now.' He was one of the ones who resigned."
Cudnik says "the mutiny," as it's now jokingly referred to in the gay and lesbian community, might have unwittingly served as a flashpoint of unity.
"We probably had more people in one room at the same time (on Sept. 11) than anything I've seen," she says. "There was a consensus to move forward ... the realization that the perception is a true one that, right or wrong, it has been an organization of affluent, white males. We talked a little about how we could be more inclusive.
"It's definitely a much more radical group. Right now, it's a much more diverse organization than I've ever seen it."
The board now consists of five men, one of whom, co-chair Roy Ford, is black; the others are white. There are seven women -- two, Brewer and Brionnea Williams, are black and the rest are white.
Three current Stonewall members -- all gay white men -- declined to be interviewed for this story.
Cudnik, who came to Cincinnati to head Stonewall in 1999 after serving in Cleveland as managing editor of Gay People's Chronicle, says she can't remember a time when gays, lesbians, blacks and whites here were ever unified.
Stonewall, then, might have been guilty of falling under the lull of the city that birthed it.
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Photo By Jymi Bolden
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Doreen Cudnik (far right) is the former executive
director of Stonewall Cincinnati.
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"I think the gay community here is reflective of the climate, especially for people who grew up here," Cudnik says. "They see it as the shining city on the hill that doesn't have pornography and big-city problems and they're proud of it. This is a very conservative Gay Lesbian Bisexual Trans-Gendered (GLBT) community."
Cudnik herself was on the receiving end of some of Stonewall's splintering when, just shy of a two-year stint, she left the helm of Stonewall under the weight of the group's financial woes.
"I came into Stonewall at a crucial juncture," she says. "Part of what I was hearing was we weren't visible enough. Issue 3 happened in 1993, but there wasn't anything to mobilize members."
Kyles, a 10-year member of Stonewall, says economics are crucial to gay-specific groups not solely for the purposes of furthering their cause but also because gays find financial stability a means to assimilation.
"I joined Stonewall because my friends were part of it and to get to know the issues in the country and in the city at the time," he says. "Stonewall had a purpose then, but it was a struggle back then -- it was money. You have to have money to finance a movement. In order for the struggle to be a success you've got to finance it."
Articles and issues
Despite current appearances to the contrary, the gay and lesbian community here can also be issue-oriented. That is, should the need arise.
But it's often too little, too late.
In November 1993, when Article 12, the anti-gay rights Cincinnati City Charter amendment known as Issue 3, was passed by voters 62-38 percent, gays and lesbians mobilized in an unsuccessful attempt to return the issue to the ballot for a possible repeal.
In 1998, the U.S. Supreme Court ended the five-year battle over Issue 3 when it refused to hear challenges to the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals' ruling that upheld the charter amendment.
As it stands today, Issue 3 bars Cincinnati City Council from ever enacting future laws that would provide specific legal rights to gays and lesbians, stripping their protection under the city's Human Rights Ordinance. Cincinnati remains the only city in America with such anti-civil rights laws.
Issue 3 cemented Cincinnati's national reputation for being intolerant, conservative and segregated along racial, gender and socioeconomic lines. It also further alienated black and white homosexuals, in large part because of the chorus of black ministers who lined up to help pass Issue 3. That, in turn, thickened the stew of internalized homophobia many black gays and lesbians were already wilting beneath.
Black voters and black clergy might have seen the passage of Issue 3 as a final resolution to "the gay problem" they still believe to be largely a white issue.
Then there were the black gays miffed because, during the anti-Issue 3 campaign, white gays equated homophobia with racism in order to further their cause. Blacks resented that familiarity.
Can you say, "Your blues ain't like mine"?
Throughout, racism has been like acid reflux, returning and churning.
"I think racism is an issue in Cincinnati, anyway," Hicks says. "And you compound it by adding sexuality. For things to get better between gays and lesbians, they've gotta get better in Cincinnati."
"It's about presence," Bryant says. "We show up when it's time to party, but we don't show up when it's time to come to the table and talk about the issues."
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Photo By Jymi Bolden
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Drag performer Samantha Rollins at Pipeline, one of
many white-owned gay clubs.
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Out here on my own
As black-and-white as racism within the gay community appears, there's enough to go around.
Imagine being a mixed-race lesbian in Cincinnati. Imagine being Korean American. Imagine being Sophia Zapf.
"It's hard to network and find any Asian anything," Zapf says. "It's such a proud culture."
That pride earned her a lot of battle scars growing up on the city's mostly white, working-class West side.
"I've been fighting since I was 6 years old," says Zapf, a classically trained violinist whose late mother was Korean and whose father is white. "And I haven't stopped."
Zapf battles not only gay stigmas but also cultural precepts dictating Asians as passive, honorable and quiet.
"The Asian community is just non-existent, and they just don't share their woes unless you're talking to another Asian," says Zapf, who's in a long-term relationship with a white woman.
Like with blacks, there's internalized homophobia and racism within the Asian community.
"I was the person in high school making fun of fags and dykes and then, overnight, I was one," she says. "There's racism within the Asian community. They don't want you to go with another non-Asian person."
And it's all compounded by her often problematic relationship with her mother. Homosexuality is perhaps more of an abomination among Asians than it is among blacks.
"When my mom found out, I was kicked out of the house," Zapf says. "It's totally taboo."
More comfortable with herself now than she ever was in the past, Zapf still daily wrestles with her identity crisis.
"I am exactly half," she says. "I've had to deal with two different aspects all my life. When you're mixed, you tend to go toward mixed people. I have a lot of mixed friends, but my white friends all hang with white people.
"It's hard, but I can be a chameleon. I have so many identities. I can slink from group to another group, but I'm always on the outside looking in. I have a lot of identities within the culture."
Zapf says though the social landscape of gay Cincinnati has changed -- there are now more bars, clubs, support groups and bookstores -- segregation is as prevalent today as when she came out 18 years ago.
"When I came out, there was Shirley's and Copa's and it was so segregated -- a white bar and a black bar, and I never got any attention from black women," she says.
While black gays and lesbians are constantly searching for their own images, Zapf, too, seeks herself in her environment.
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Photo By Jymi Bolden
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Dianna Brewer, of the Unity House World Peace
Center, was among a small group of black lesbians
who demanded and got inclusion on Stonewall
Cincinnati’s board.
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"I'm waiting for my own role models," she says. "Why have I read every Amy Tan book and she's Chinese? Why do we have only Margaret Cho? But I hang on her every word."
Similarly, blacks have ostracized Zapf just as they've been alienated by whites.
"Racially, I've been hurt by black people the most," she says. "I've never understood it, because I've always thought we're the minority."
Still, minority status never guarantees her unity with blacks.
Her dream world? One in which minorities will show whites how it's done.
"I wish minorities would acknowledge minorities," says Zapf. "There's so many reasons for minorities to come together. Sometimes I look around and I'm bothered that most of my friends are white."
Zapf lived in Chicago from 1989 to 1995 and experienced a myriad of cultures. Her return home was a study in contrasts.
"After living in Chicago, I came back and I forgot how black-and-white this city is," she says. "Everybody looked the same to me."
The beginning again
Ultimately, gays and lesbians in Cincinnati will have to lead the charge to a more inclusive community. And they have to do it as an example to the rest of the city.
"Black people as well as white people have to take responsibility," says Brewer of the Unity House. "We've gotta get out of these cliques."
Kyles agrees, going one better to contend that black gays and lesbians can break from their apathy and internalized homophobia with the direct help of other blacks.
"The problem with the black gay and lesbian community is we don't have anyone from the private community," for support, he says.
Issues such as AIDS that transcend gays and lesbians -- but that are normally affiliated only with gays -- will have to be tackled as a gauge of real progress, says Hicks, co-founder of Prodigy Productions.
"The rise in AIDS cases is astounding," she says. "A lot of people don't realize a lot of people are dipping and dabbing" in unprotected homosexual activity.
Hicks says homophobia in Cincinnati breeds selective ignorance. Its by-product is straight people living double lives.
"Because of that," she says, "we're passing it off to each other."
Cudnik says she's glad Stonewall's board was awakened by the "mutiny" on Sept. 11. It saved an otherwise vital organization from becoming socially sterile.
"The more activist element in the GLBT community decided that Stonewall is too valuable to lose and it was time to hold the organization accountable to its human rights mission," she says. "April's riots changed things for the organization."
Brewer, for one, remains optimistic despite and because of the events of April 2001.
"I think it can get better," she says. "It has to get better. People can only take so much. If not, young black males will continually get shot down in the street."
And what's an unarmed black man's death by a white police officer got to do with race relations in the gay and lesbian community?
"I think it's all about culture, the differences in culture," Kyles says. "We don't have the same interests."
Isn't that the point? ©
