Gay People Are Hunted Down and Beaten in a Country Once a Refuge

For Africans passing by, it was as if the grim blur of their daily reality came into sudden, gruesome focus: here was an Indian man beating a bleeding African child.

A thousand gays—many of them more willing to come out for a party than they’d been to come out for campaign work—dressed formally in suits and ties despite the South Florida weather, now stood stunned and tearful, looking up at the screens that told them that most of their neighbors loathed them.

“We are fighting good versus evil, dark versus light,” she said, declaring that she was rising up like Queen Esther, the biblical heroine who saved her people from death.

“We are tired of being made out to be these horrible people,” she said, acknowledging there was some violence but insisting on the falsehood that Antifa was behind it.

homosexuals were easy prey for communists,

Life magazine—in an alarming article that asked, “Do the Homosexuals, Like the Communists, Intend to Bury Us?”

The girl with the long dreads lived in a house with a man, a Howard professor, who was married to a white woman. The Howard professor slept with men. His wife slept with women. And the two of them slept with each other. They had a little boy who must be off to college by now. “Faggot” was a word I had employed all my life. And now here they were, T

Far from any queer movement or urban politics, far from academic theories of gender, lives a possibility, a true heritage of tolerance and integration. Among a people who can and have absorbed so much, whose gods are many-limbed and multigendered, whose lives are filled with all manner of suffering, sexual identity is the least of it.