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Black: Change 'has to happen now'

by Jessica Carreras

DETROIT – Academy Award-winning screenplay writer and director, and LGBT activist, Dustin Lance Black called for increased cohesion between the gay community and other minority groups at a March 10 speech given at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.
The ACLU of Michigan hosted the event as part of their Legacy Lecture series, commemorating their 50th anniversary.
Black spoke of his childhood in San Antonio, Texas, growing up in a Mormon household, as well as his own struggle to come out as a gay man. He detailed his journey to LGBT activism, his great reverence for the late Harvey Milk and how he's not "a natural-born leader."
The audience at last Wednesday's event, hanging on Black's every word and cheering intermittently throughout his speech, would beg to differ.
Black tied in Milk's work in San Francisco in the 1970s to modern-day struggles for LGBT equality in states like Michigan, urging activists to take note of Milk's tactics.
"The most important piece of Harvey's philosophy – and perhaps the most vital — was that his work did not start and stop with the gay and lesbian movement," Black said. "He understood the interconnectedness of all minority groups. He understood that the LGBT movement is just one piece of a much larger, completely interrelated civil rights struggle."
For example, continued Black, Milk's work with union groups to help them get recognition from the beer company Coors. Or his coalition building with racial minorities and women's rights groups. Those coalitions, Black said, are the crucial piece to winning our battles today for LGBT equality.
However, he contended that mainstream national LGBT organizations do not utilize those tools as well as they could. "Gay and lesbian liberation is inseparable from the liberation of all marginalized people," Black stated. "But sadly, it seems to me that the mainstream, corporate LGBT politics and organizations have become myopic; we've become self-serving, working for gay rights exclusively.

"I firmly believe that the time has come for the gay and lesbian movement to reach out again and work just as hard for our brothers and sisters in other communities as we have for ourselves."
In Michigan, for example, Black cited his experience in Holland while filming his upcoming film "What's Wrong With Virginia?" While there, a student from local Hope College asked Black to screen "Milk" and speak at the school, but the event was banned from happening.
Instead of just backing off and leaving things be, Black pushed forward to make the screening happen at a different venue in Holland. He was shocked, he said, to see high attendance not just from students and the local LGBT community, but from allies in the straight community who came to show their support.
Black even took time to speak with the dean of Hope College, who held fast to his homophobia. "It became crystal clear that the problem wasn't gay people or Hollywood people or even people from California," Black said of the meeting. "The problem was a fear of people with different worlds or different viewpoints, and I was reminded of Harvey Milk, who said that the war against homophobia was a war against fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of what is different."
Black contends that fear is what is holding Michigan back from equality. "That's where the fight for LGBT rights is here in Michigan," he explained. "The fight isn't about marriage rights – not yet. The fight here is still for the freedom to come out; for LGBT people here to feel free to live authentically as who they are."
Black called for an end to discrimination that keeps LGBT people in the closet in Michigan, and stressed that the community must not wait any longer to make it happen.
"It's the only way LGBT people can dispel the myths and fears and stereotypes that so many still hold," he said. "Those myths and those fears have plagued my people and plagued this country now for generations. That is why it is so vitally important that we pass fully inclusive LGBT non-discrimination legislation statewide here in Michigan. It can't happen tomorrow. It has to happen now. Right now."
And, added Black, it takes true leaders – like Milk – to make those changes happen, even when politics and polls say "no."
"If you're going to lead, you cannot be afraid to fight," he said to a cheering crowd. "You cannot be afraid to fight for the change you feel is true, or the truth that you've come to know."

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