Let The Philadelphia Gay News Know......

they cannot continue to marginalize the lives of Black LGBT's in their paper any longer! As I said in my last post, I was angered that the Philadelphia Gay News (PGN) provided absolutely no coverage of the events that took place during Philadelphia's 7th annual Black Gay Pride celebration at the end of April. As expected however, there was a great deal of coverage on the Equality Forum in their newspaper, which took place the week after Black Pride. For those of you not familiar with Equality Forum, it is a big LGBT event, here in Philadelphia that takes place the last week of April/1st week of May and is primarily frequented by Caucasian LGBT's. I have no beef at all wtih Equality Forum, just with the PGN and what it chooses to report on.

It's this kind of lopsided coverage by the PGN on the lives of the Black LGBT community that continues to keep the lives and contributions we make to the larger community invisible. It's also saturated with racism, promoting White LGBT prominence, while feeding into Black LGBT marginalization. Black folks who are desperately seeking to find a positive image of themselves in the gay press, such as the PGN, are hard pressed to find one. I believe the gay press has a responsibility to cover the full spectrum of the LGBT experience, and the Black Gay Men's Leadership Council (BGMLC) is going to hold the PGN accountable for this.

Below I have pasted the letter that the BGMLC wrote to the PGN. If you know of anyone in the metro Philly area, send them a link to this post. We need all the community support we can get to put pressure on the PGN and to let them know that the Black LGBT community DOES have a powerful voice when we feel we're not being treated with respect. In case you want to send an email, write a letter or call the PGN, here is the contact information:

505 South 4th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147
(215) 625-8501
Web addy: www.epgn.com
Editor: Marco Baker
email: marco@epgn.com
_______________________________________________
DATE: May 22, 2006
FROM: The Black Gay Men’s Leadership Council
TO: Marco Baker, Editor of the PGN
RE: PGN and marginal coverage of certain LGBT communities

Dear Mr. Baker:

As a collective of Black Gay men who live in the City of Philadelphia, we write to express our disappointment with the lack of diverse coverage in your newspaper, and, in particular, the 7th Annual Philadelphia Black Gay Pride events. We are concerned that celebratory events targeting racial and/or ethnic LGBT communities are regularly left invisible.

Beyond doubt, we appreciate the important coverage of Equality Forum. But as one example, there were four pieces dedicated to the event, with one piece featuring a full page of photographs in the May 12-18 issue. Though you wrote one short article and one slightly larger article about Philadelphia Black Gay Pride prior to the events, the actual events received no coverage.

Philadelphia Black Gay Pride featured many newsworthy and outstanding events; notably, a panel discussion on safety and civil rights concerns. The event brought together local and national civil rights and law enforcement organizations, and diverse members of our community. This standing room only event was moderated by Loraine Ballard Morrill, the News and Community Affairs Director for Clear Channel Communications Philadelphia. The lively panel concluded with the debut of a palm card that provided suggestions on what to do if stopped by the police and tips for reporting hate crimes and police maltreatment. Despite a press release and a follow-up phone call, the PGN missed an important opportunity to report on alliance building and collaborative work between entities that recognize and support the human nature of safety and civil rights concerns.

Unfortunately, this type of silence propels a dangerous message: positive, noteworthy events targeting our non-white LGBT community members are not important or newsworthy. Additionally, it helps maintain, support and uphold the idea of ‘black LGBT invisibility’ and the myth that homosexuality is a “white thing.” This is a racist message that homophobes often use to build and strengthen alliances and create arguments against gay marriage or any other civil rights issues that require the support of all communities, especially our straight allies.

Members of our communities must be careful to not provide ammunition to those seeking to limit or take away our fundamental rights. We cannot tolerate marginalization within the LGBT community. Hence, we demand that the PGN provide greater press coverage related to the diverse LGBT experiences occurring in Philadelphia, including LGBT communities of color. We believe that there are ideas and solutions on how to provide ample coverage. To this end, we, as members of the BGMLC, are willing to meet with the appropriate PGN staff to share our ideas on making your paper more inclusive of diverse LGBT experiences. We ask that you seek and incorporate these, and other, ideas so that politicians and local businesses can continue to use the PGN as an adequate source to fairly and effectively reach constituents and clients. We share your vision of an honest news source that works with integrity and professionalism to serve the LGBT community. With these changes, we believe that the PGN can serve as a model of fair, non-marginal “gay press.” Even still, it can exist another 30 years with deeper respect from Philadelphia’s racially and/or ethnically diverse LGBT communities.

We hope to receive a response to this letter by June 19, 2006. We can be contacted via email at phl_bgmlc@yahoo.com. If you respond by phone or postal mail, contact Lee Carson at (215) xxx-xxxx or by mail xxxxxx, Philadelphia, PA 19145. If we receive no response, we will be forced to believe that you are uninterested in this communal plea to uphold ideas of diversity and inclusion. We will organize a community response, including contacting businesses that advertise in the PGN to enlist their support in having a media source committed to covering the diverse experiences of our community.

In Anticipation,



Lee Carson, MSW
Black Gay Men’s Leadership Council

Pride, Anger, Unemployment & India

I haven't been posting on current events recently like I would like or have in the past, but believe me, I have opinions on some of the things I've been seeing in the news. As has been the case the past few months, the past few weeks since my last post have been busy. The title of this post reflects a few of my experiences since my last post.

Pride
Black Pride here in Philly was pretty cool. I have to admit though, and maybe I'm a little biased, but I most enjoyed the events that the Black Gay Men's Leadership Council (which I'm a member of) hosted. On the Friday evening of Pride, we held a Civil Rights panel at the host hotel. We put a lot of work in the few weeks prior to the event to get the panelists together and to get our palm card developed that we wanted to debut at the event. The palm cards inform people on how to protect their civil rights if they feel they are being treated unfairly by the police or if they find themselves the victim of a hate crime. The cards also provide contact information for resources that can help a person in the event they find themselves the victim of a crime. We had over 50 people who attended the panel, so the room we had was pretty packed and we were able to capture the panel on film. There was a large youth presence, which was great and they asked questions and shared some of their negative experiences with the police. Overall we got positive feedback about the panel and the Council is working on identifying the next action steps we plan to take on this issue.

Our second event was a networking happy hour event, held in CC, around the corner from the host hotel. Again, we had a good turnout and there was a good mix of men and women, which doesn't happen often in social spaces that I've seen here in Philly. The Hors d' vours at the event were off the chain! They had a brotha wishin' I bought a Ziploc bag to put some of the appetizers in. And yes I would have done it if I had one.....LOL. Since we had 2 successful happy hours at this venue, I think we're going to try to do it on a monthly basis, so any Philadelphians who come across this, hit me up and I can let you know when they will be held.

On Saturday night there are always two main men’s party's that happen, thrown by the same people every year. The Firm and then a guy named Chris. As folks may have read on Clay Canes Blog, The Firm wasn't letting trans folks into their party this year. Historically this party advertises to a more "masculine" crowd, and urban "thug drag" is the uniform of choice for its attendees. I was finding this hard to believe, that during Pride, one of the party's would discriminate against a segment of the community like that. So I decided to ask someone who would know if this was true or not and he confirmed that they were indeed not allowing trans folks into their party. I didn't feel that I could support an event like that, so I decided to go to Chris's party, which was at a club that has 3 floors, with a different style of music on each and no limitations on who could or couldn't attend. The party was nice, but it was madd crowded. I don't know what possessed me to put on the footwear I did, but I should have known better. I had on some suede Timberland sneakers and by the time I left the club they were a mess. I had a huge boot print on one of them.

We attended the community event the next day, which was held indoors since it has historically been cold and sometimes rainy on the day of that event in the past. I think with the event being indoors, it shifted the energy and I didn't like it as much as I did last year. Of course this year, it was warm and sunny out, go figure. I was just about through though, when they started a competition on who can tell the best "you know you so ghetto when...." joke. Why do we always have to go there?!?!

Anger
The Monday before our Civil Rights Panel during Pride, I sent out a press release to several media sources in hopes we might get some coverage for the event. The one media outlet out of all of them, that I thought hands down should have covered the event and wrote something about it, was the local gay newspaper, called the Philadelphia Gay News (PGN). Two days prior to the event, I called the Editor of the paper, who I understand is a Black Gay man who would hopefully be interested in covering the story. He didn't answer, so I left him a message. Well.......not only did they not provide any coverage of our event, but there was absolutely no coverage of Philadelphia's Black Gay Pride at all in their paper the following week. I was vexed!!! How can the only gay newspaper in town not cover such a large event? Why would they participate in the invisibility of positive stories of Black folks that the mainstream press is so good at ignoring? The PGN is known for being a very White oriented paper, rarely covering stories that are relevant to the lives of people of color. But I plan to turn my anger into action, which I'll reveal at a later time. In all actuality, because the PGN doesn't really cover stories relevant to lives of POC, not many POC read it. And although it's readership is mostly White, I feel they still need to be responsible for covering the full spectrum of the LGBT experience and not just the experience of the White LGBT community.

Unemployment
I have been working with one of my clients in Germantown now for about 6 months and during that whole time, he has been looking for a job. A little background on this young man is that he is mildly Autistic, but very intelligent, African American, 18 years old and has never held a job before. He has applied to several places, but hasn't gotten a call back from any of them. He has been sheltered by his mother for most of his life, so he has limited social skills and has some limitations on his social skills due to the Autism as well.

In our last session, I decided that I would try to help him find a job, because he's been trying so hard and I think he would make a good employee, if someone would give him the chance. I thought maybe if I went with him and could talk to a manager and advocate for him, that it might help to get him a job. Boy was I naive! We went to 2 places in the neighborhood where he lives, one a grocery store and the other a CVS. I was amazed at how hard it is to talk to a real person these days about your employment inquiries at low level jobs such as a grocery store or retail. Everyone has you fill out an application online or on a computer in the store, no more paper. You can't event get a manager to come and talk to you about potential job opportunities either. What stunned me even more was the process CVS has you go through to apply for a job. Before you even get called for an interview you have to fill out a very extensive questionnaire, which is really more of a psychological test than an application. They asked my client all kinds of questions about his personality and even asked if he received food stamps. I was thinking, what the hell does that have to do with getting a job at CVS? Or anywhere for that matter! Does that weigh for you or against you? That just seems so inappropriate to ask of a potential employee.

I picked up immediately that these questions are used to build a psychological profile of potential applicants so they can easily weed through people who don't score well on the test, which are people, per the test, that wouldn't make a good employee. Whatever happened to filling out an application on paper and being able to interview with a real person before being judged on whether or not you might be a good employee? It's hard to get even a basic job these days. No wonder so many young people find it hard to get a job, because there are constant barriers in their path they have to try to navigate and you have to have patience, which is a virtue that doesn't exist a great deal in modern society any more it seems. I tried to coach him on how to answer the questions as I figured I knew what would be the answers they are looking for in someone they would be willing to hire. It will be interesting to see if he gets called for an interview.

India Arie
Last Wednesday, India Arie was in Philly promoting her new album, that's coming out at the end of June. I was able to get invited to her listening party at this fabulous cafe' in the Old City section of Philly. I got there madd early and was able to get a seat really close to the stage. The place was packed and she was good. I've never really been a big fan of hers, though I really like her new song "I Am Not My Hair", the version with Akon in it. She performed well live. Here are a few pics of her performance here in Philly: