Kenyon Farrow's Speech on HIV/AIDS From Creating Change 2009 in Denver

Kenyon Farrow is an organizer, communications strategist and writer working on issues at the intersection of HIV/AIDS, prisons and homophobia. A current Policy Institute fellow with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Farrow is working on a report about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Black gay and bisexual men in the U.S. This is a copy if his speech from the 2009 Creating Change Conference.

PERSONAL NOTE: Kenyon Farrow is a friend of mine, an inspiration to me, and a great and powerful asset to our work and this movement. He also works at Queers for Economic Justice.

SPEECH

In 1991, nearly 18 years ago, I was 15 years old when my mother, who was working 13 hour days, 6 days a week in Cleveland, OH, sat me and my two sisters down in front of the television to watch history.

It was not unusual for her to do such a thing. For, we had been made to watch the Civil Rights Documentary "Eyes on The Prize" in its entirety. We also watched "How the West Was Lost," the documentary about White American expansion into the "Americas" and the genocide of First Nation peoples--to understand what we perhaps weren't learning in one of the worst school districts in the country.

But that night, in 1991, my mother--after right-wing Senators Jesse Helms and Arlen Spector tried to protect "American Families" from being able to view it public television--sat us in front of the television to watch Marlon Riggs' breakthrough film on black gay men, Tongues Untied.
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The film, and the poetry of the men in the film, particularly Essex Hemphill, was for me the example of the possibility of a Black gay life, of an aesthetic, and of a radical, sex-positive, pro-feminist politic. They were, quite literally, the men of my own dreams.

Though they would both make more films, more books, they would both be dead of HIV-related causes by 1995, within one year of each other. And just short of the first anti-retrovirals to hit the market. And half of the people in this room don't even know of the two names that I speak.

Despite their examples as two of many who spent the late 80s and early 1990s literally writing us into the history of the planet while they were being dragged from the face of it, we have largely lost the layered, nuanced, and multi-issue nature of their brilliant work, which very clearly demonstrates the social conditions of Black working class queer life in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Theirs was not a politics of inclusion--but a politics of sexual liberation in a decidedly Black gay context.

These men, and many others who died from HIV or from violence, were not only cultural workers but were in fact movement-minded folk--starting and running organizations, writing and creating, and making political alliances with Black lesbian organizations, other radical third-world people of color artists and organizers.

Their work that gave the public health world, and the mainstream LGBT movement a body of work with which to fashion ideas around the context of HIV/AIDS among Black "men who have sex with men." But instead of looking to that work as insight and inspiration, we have built a public health, Black, and/or LGBT movement response to HIV/AIDS among Black MSM with the decidedly ignorant assumption that we don't know what's going on with Black "men who have sex with men" and that there is no Black queer leadership that currently exists or could not be further nurtured and developed.
STATISTICS

Despite major advances in treating the virus, the HIV/AIDS epidemic seems to be getting worse for people in our community. At the International AIDS Conference, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stunned the international AIDS community by announcing that the richest nation on earth had over 56,000 new infections in 2006. This revision also included a back-calculation revealing that, for the 15 years from 1991-2006, infection rates were approximately 25-50 percent higher than the long-held 40,000 annual estimate.

Not only have we been undercounting the growth of the epidemic, men who have sex with men (MSM -- that public health category that includes gay and bisexual men, and transgender women) continue to bear the greatest increases in new infections. In 2006, 53 percent of all new infections were among MSM.

More stunning, it found the number of new infections of black MSM ages 13-29 to be the highest of all MSM groups. Even though CDC officials are typically conservative in its public statements, CDC scientists are stating publicly that black MSM are the only group in the U.S. with HIV rates similar to Sub-Saharan African nations, despite similar or lower rates of risky sex or substance abuse than white MSM.

Though transwomen are counted in the "MSM" category, some data has shown Black MTF transwomen have an HIV prevalence rate of 56%.

While black MSM certainly bear the brunt of the virus, gay and bisexual the virus disproportionately impacts men and transgender women of all races.
POLICY

There are many policy changes that we'd like to see, many of which are encompassed in the National AIDS Strategy, and those are likely to happen. So I am going to focus on what we in this room, as activists and organizers in the LGBT movement, need to do.
MOVEMENT

First and foremost, the time where we can pretend that there is no viable, credible or visible Black (or other POC) queer leadership is over. While we certainly need to be developing leaders, leadership per se, is not the problem. We have lost of leaders, but leaders with no base that they're accountable to. Because what little Black LGBT infrastructure that exists, is largely due to HIV/AIDS service delivery, we are able to reach lots of people in our organizations as "clients", but are rarely engaged as potential leaders, organizers or members of our organizations. We need the investment of both progressive philanthropy and LGBT funders to help build the capacity and infrastructure of organizations to move from strict service delivery to doing community organizing, leadership development, and base-building.

Lastly, as long as the White-led mainstream LGBT movement is invested in seeing itself as the only credible leadership or it's organizations the only ones doing "the real work" or having "real impact" we will continue to invisibilize the work that Black and other POC organizations are doing on the ground, in spite of real material obstacles. So every time the gay news media and organizations promote ideas of the gay community vs. the Black community, Black queers will continue to remain invisible, and assumes that Black queer people are not engaging in a battle against homophobia and transphobia in the Black community.

Phrases like the Advocate's recent "Gay is the New Black" which has surfaced in stickers and T-shirts in gayborhoods as well, is racist, dangerous, and ignores the reality despite having a Black president, Black people in America continue to suffer a vast array of health, and socio-economic disparities, even when you control for all other factors. Not only that, it also, once again, presumes that to be LGB or T is to be white and usually male.

Just yesterday at this conference, a major figure in the same-sex marriage movement told a young queer person of color that "there are some people in our community who are fit to lobby, and some who are fit to sing and dance."

These kinds of comments are simply disgusting, particularly since many people of color and transgender people in white gay male spaces are only allowed in to do as much. The sad thing is, for too many people of color in this movement, the line between being asked by white-led organizations to lobby, or to sing & dance, is far too thin.

I think a lot about Marlon Riggs, Essex Hemphill, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde and many others, as artists and organizers and activists who have led the way for me to be able to stand here on this stage, and it seems sad to me that in my work as a writer and here with the Task Force & Queers for Economic Justice, with my comrades in the room and in various movements around the country-- having to make the arguments, they'd been making for decades.

And we can have all of our policy wish lists items and services around HIV met--but without movement building from the grassroots of people most vulnerable to serve as the place where real change happens. And so long as no cure is found we will not see an end to the epidemic and the disproportionate impact it has on people of African descent globally.

I would hope, that after the decades of efforts to make visible the work that Black LGBTQ people are engaged in directly or indirectly related to HIV/AIDS, not another person has to stand here, decades from now, having to justify or make visible that work, ever again. We are beyond the point of benign ignorance. The bodies in this room, and the graveyards many of us are carrying on our backs, tell a different story.

And so now, should we.

Creating Change

Creating Change this year, as every year, had its problems. Evan Wolfson, a “prominent” leader in the movement---particularly of the marriage “equality” movement told an activist that some queers are fit to lobby while others are only fit to sing and dance. Recalling historic representations of people of color (particularly African-Americans) that are hurtful, painful, racist, and white supremacist at their core. There were again no workshops on non-monogamy and polyamory. Some young people felt that the conference was reformist and not radical enough (I agree).

But, there were some also fairly stunning moments.

To begin with, the conference was opened and closed by the Two Spirit Collective--recognizing that this conference is held (wherever it is in the U.S.) on stolen native lands. Rea Carey, demonstrating phenomenal leadership, stood in front of the conference and acknowledged that by forgetting to name bisexual people in her state of the movement address, she contributed to making them invisible. It was an omission on her part caused by nervousness as she made her first major address as executive director of the Task Force, but she recognizes the impact and did what was necessary to heal it. Thank GOD that the leaders of the late 90s radical queer youth movement are now the ones taking the reigns of leadership of our national organizations.

The speeches by Kenyon Farrow and Bishop Yvette Flunder smashed through the room and made present and visible and powerful people of African descent as leaders in this movement. The performance by The Kinsey Six Dragapella group was entertaining, political, and brilliant---as was their call to support the cultural arm of the queer movement. An arm of which, as a spoken word artist, I am a part.

And then there were the people. A surprise appearance by friend and former youth agitator M’Bwende Anderson was a deeply amazing encounter. Her daughter Ella is stunning. Reconnecting and supporting my friend Debanuj Das Gupta through a spoken word performance with Asha Leong was also a deep moment of love and solidarity in the face of our fucked up immigration system. Hanging out with Asha and driving to the mountains followed by burgers at the campy Hamburger Mary’s was also pretty awesome. Asha and I grew up in the movement together--particularly in the Southern queer youth movement, and it was nice to reconnect with her...even if it was at Buffalo Bill’s grave site and resulted in me getting altitude sickness.

Of course seeing Russell Roybal, and Marta Alvarado, and Carlos Molina, and Scott Pegues, and dozens of other people that have played real roles in building who I am, was also pretty amazing. And, it was a warm reminder that I am well known, well regarded, and loved in this movement.

I was honored to hang out with an connect with some of the fierce younger folks from Fierce that are doing the damn thing and making change happen. I danced last night at a bar packed with beautiful brown and black queer folks. I even spent a moment on the street laughing with Coya.

My one regret was that my partner, lover, and friend David was not able to be with us. I get him in Oakland this coming week, but I wanted what Ryan Li and Sara had...someone to go back to the hotel room with....lay side by side...and talk about the day, discuss what we learned, debrief our experiences, and take those moments deeper and broader. It will happen, but he was missed at this conference this weekend.

Creating Change was a good experience this year. Not perfect by any means, but I know personally and trust the leadership of NGLTF. Russell Roybal and Rea Carey are old friends, mentors, and they get it. We grew up together in this movement, and for once I know that the movement is moving in the right direction.

We Are Not Forgotten

I was just quite literally moved to tears after listening to Kenyon Farrow and the Bishop Yvette Flunder at a plenary here at Creating Change 2009. The plenary was focused on HIV/AIDS. Both Kenyon and Bishop Flunder were tremendous speakers that had powerful words to share. I am going to write a full blog about what they said and how they moved me. But, right now, I am overwhelmed. But I will leave you with this: when speaking of black folks and the queer movement Bishop Flunder demanded:

"It took a long time to get from Martin to Barack. We will NOT leave anyone behind. We will take all the time we need. We will shout on it. We will pray on it. We will sing on it. Amen."