For someone who’s part of what he calls an invisible group, Ken Reeves has a highly visible job.
He has served two terms as mayor of Cambridge, Mass. He is in his fourth term as a member of the Cambridge City Council.
He was the first black mayor in that state’s history and perhaps the first openly gay mayor in the country.
Indeed, his experiences as an African-American gay man are not like most, he said Saturday during the Chicago Black LesBiGayTrans Unity Conference at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“It is remarkable that in 1997, we are still in the shadows,” Reeves told the audience. “We are a people who must stand up and say who we are. We have to grow. You have to come out and tell this story. You cannot tell it in the darkness.”
That’s just what the 150 participants in the third annual conference resolved to do.
They talked about coming out. And homophobia. And AIDS. They talked frankly about sex, about distrusting condoms and other safer-sex paraphernalia.
And the participants in the daylong series of workshops talked about building a sense of community.
“You and I have something to give to our community,” Reeves said. “They need it now. We can’t suffer in silence.”
Chicago Black Lesbians and Gays, the conference’s sponsor, formed three years ago after organizers realized their needs weren’t being addressed by other gay and lesbian organizations, said the group’s co-chairwoman, Renae Ogletree.
Since then, the group has worked to raise money for black AIDS organizations and gay and lesbian scholarship funds. They’ve sent people to participate in the National Black Lesbian and Gay Leadership Forum. They’ve tried to promote conversations about homophobia and AIDS in the city’s African-American churches.
“Being visible is our driving force,” said Byron Stewart, 33, a Chicago actor who recently founded a black gay performance ensemble. “There are so many people who are in the closet because they don’t have people to relate to.”
Organizers said there is much work still to be done.
Though new AIDS cases are declining for much of the population, they are on the rise for African-American men, Reeves said. There still are not many openly gay minorities in political office, and gay and lesbian people of color still aren’t often included in policy-making decisions, he said.
Reeves talked about a recent conference at Harvard University on the course of the gay rights movement. He received a program before the event and scanned the list of speakers. He didn’t see the names of any African-Americans or Latinos.
“There are a lot of groups speaking on behalf of gay people,” he said, holding up a program from the Harvard conference. “But they never asked you or me.”
