Ladies in Exile: Don Lemon and the Black + Gay + High Profile Equation

Yesterday, in a New York Times article about his forthcoming book, the CNN news anchor Don Lemon effectively 'came out.'

There are only two other major news anchors who are 'out'; the others are Rachel Maddow and Thomas Roberts of MSNBC. So, through his public profile, Mr. Lemon hopes to encourage openness and feelings of security in other gay Americans.

His coworkers at CNN, he explains, have partly already known that he was gay, and the company is inviting him to appear on its shows to promote the book Transparency, like the Newsroom.

In the Times article, he says, “I think if I had seen more people like me who are out and proud, it wouldn’t have taken me 45 years to say it [. . .], to walk in the truth.”

The reaction to it seems to have been friendly. "I'm overwhelmed by all your tweets and support!", Mr. Lemon wrote on Twitter, "Hoping this prevents more tragedies like tyler clementi's suicide." (Background on Tyler Clementi.)

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The article explains that the difficulties in coming out lie beyond the obvious, in that the black community in America — to which Don Lemon belongs — is not as accepting of homosexuality. I'm not well informed and even if I were I'd rather not open the can of worms and prove a hypocrite, so I'll turn to Mr. Lemon's own analysis and Keith Boykin's analysis for the Huffington Post.

Mr. Boykin encapsulates it in this succinct passage:

Black gay men are more likely to live in conservative, working-class, black communities like Harlem than in gentrified gay ghettoes like Chelsea or West Hollywood or even midtown Atlanta. And we're more likely than white gay men to be involved in and conditioned by our churches.

More generally, Mr. Lemon assesses that in the African-American community,

You’re taught you have to be a man; you have to be masculine. [. . .] they think you can pray the gay away.

Besides — and this of course applies to any community — while "artistic" types are expected to be "eccentric," for instance, a trusted news anchor who is gay helps to weaken the narrow concept of a gay person in the public's mind.

(The first time I heard of widespread prejudice in the African-American community was when Prop 8 was passed in California alongside the presidential elections in 2008, banning gay marriage, and exit polls showed that black voters were 70% for it. As it turns out that was an exaggerated figure, though, and the pro-Prop 8 votes themselves were possibly more like 58%.)

As a counterpoint and a sign of how much is still wrong in society, Mr. Boykin mentions that the NBA basketball player Grant Hill (who is hetero) spoke in a commercial against the use of the word "gay" as a general pejorative adjective, which was broadcast on Sunday, and the response on Twitter was quite homophobic.

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Update: During the 2012 presidential and state elections, indicators tend to contradict the previous majority in African American voters' attitudes toward same-sex marriage:

1. The NAACP ran a poll from November 1st to 5th this year, of roughly 1,600 voters in Georgia, Florida, Ohio and Virginia. Its findings on marriage:

African American voters favor marriage equality by 50% and the percentage increased to 57% when language regarding specific religious protections were added.

2. The Los Angeles Times reports that gay rights campaigners approached African American churches for support this year — and received it — in Maryland:

In Maryland, where African Americans make up about 30% of the population, a black megachurch helped spur support for marriage rights. An exit poll showed that 27% of voters were African American, and half supported marriage rights, according to the Human Rights campaign