Both black and gay: Internal rights fight

It was already challenging enough for Cornelius Jones Jr. to grow up being black in the racially-tense South.

But facing the prejudices of the people outside the African American community wouldn’t be the hardest struggle of his life. Even from the young age of 5, Jones had a sense of the obstacles he would face on the inside.

“I didn’t want to be associated with the weakness and nastiness that gay people were defined by in my neighborhood,” Jones remembers of his time growing up on a predominantly black street in Richmond, Va. “In my neighborhood, church and school, gays were constantly shunned, ridiculed and picked on.”

When he was 15, Jones moved to Washington, D.C. to stay with family friends and attend a performing arts high school — “and also to get away from the constant bullying I received,” he said. But they soon learned that he was gay and he was kicked out of the house. It was then that he had to confront his parents with his real identity.

His mother gave him one piece of advice: “Do what you do behind closed doors.”

It would be a lifetime of pain and struggle that would teach him that his mother’s advice was no way to awaken a black community deeply rooted in religion to the rights of gays. And it would be events like the passage of Proposition 8 — the anti-gay marriage measure in California that 70 percent of blacks voted for — that would be a platform for him to open the doors.

See Both black and gay: Internal rights fight

Philadelphia Metro

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Gay couple won’t let Proposition 8 steal their dream

Fearing taunts and disapproval, they kept their love hidden for nearly two years. But with the Nov. 4 election looming, Christopher Lewis and Cody Horton resolved to take a leap of faith.

Following in the footsteps of generations of adventurers and romantics, the shy young couple from Ohio announced they were heading west to marry and begin a new life in California. They put on dark suits and exchanged vows on an unseasonably balmy afternoon in late October, before family, friends and the wide Pacific Ocean. See
Los Angeles Times

Gay couple won’t let Proposition 8 steal their dream
Los Angeles Times, CA