June is Pride Month. And Black Pride contributes to the multicultural aspect of joy and celebration in the queer communities. Black Pride symbolizes not only black LGBTQ uniqueness as individuals and communities, but it also affirms our varied expressions of LGBTQ life in America.

This year will be our first Black Pride parade with an African American as president. And, no doubt, Obama’s presidency engenders pride but not much hope.

In Obama’s first days many of us want to know what is it with Obama and his team when it comes to our inclusion in his transformational administration?

One of our biggest obstacles in the African American community has been and continues to be the Black Church.  Obama wooed Black homophobic black ministers to win black evangelicals voters during his campaign bid.

For example, when it was disclosed that Obama’s inspirational gospel singer Donnie McClurkin, poster boy for African American ex-gay ministries,  could be a potential liability not only to his three-city gospel tour to capture South Carolina’s black evangelical voters, but also the nation’s LGBTQ voters he went into damage control.

As an appeasement plan, Obama invited an openly white gay minister, the Rev. Andy Sidden pastor of Garden of Grace United Church of Christ (formerly MCC Columbia) to speak at the gospelfest.

The Obama camp thought they stopped the fire before it got out of hand. But it backfired.

Instead, it actually outed black closeted ministers and some of the black gospel chitlin’ circuit’s closeted gay ministers who usually are the biggest opponents of queer civil rights.

And Obama’s act didn’t get him out of hot water with another consistency in the African-American community – black LGBTQ voters. Many of us denounced the Obama campaign for choosing a white minister.

“It boggles the mind that the Obama campaign would select a white pastor to deal with a situation that is awash in black homophobia,” Pam Spaulding of the highly acclaimed blog “Pam’s House Blend” wrote.

Unfortunately Obama’s choice reinforced two myths many black evangelicals hold: homosexuals are white and homosexuality is an abomination.

Frustrated with Obama’s inattention to our issues, Edwin Greene, an African American gay man from Cincinnati said, ”I think that if black LGBTs want Obama’s attention we need to “make some noise”, so to speak. Let’s organize a black LGBT demonstration/march on Washington, DC, this year. The noisy wheel gets the grease, so to speak. Let’s show Obama, the nation and the world (and ourselves, most importantly) that we mean business.”

For many of us LGBTQ African American religious activists across the country, but especially here in Massachusetts, we feel that Obama is not serious in making a dent in combating black homophobia or reaching out to the black LGBTQ community.

For example, Joshua Dubois who is the head of the White House Office for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Dubois’s office is to coordinate outreach to religious and community organizations.

But many of us are scratching our heads because we have never seen or heard of Dubois.

Sylvia Rhue, Director of Religious Affairs for National Black Justice Coalition, the only African American gay civil rights organization in the country, knows nothing about Dubois.

Since Obama’s announcement of him, those of us involved in making our black churches open and affirming are looking for Rev. Joshua Dubois, especially  here in the Greater Boston area.

Dubois, a young African American Pentecostal minister, directed the religious outreach for the Obama campaign. He’s reported to have worked as an associate pastor at a Pentecostal church in Massachusetts. But where?

“I know W.E. B. Dubois, but who is this guy Obama put in office. Has anyone seen or met him. We don’t know of his contributions to the black gay community here and where he stands on the issues. We need a strong and visible religious advocate for the LGBTQ community, but specifically the African American community,” said Rev. Glen Louis Campbell of Central Congregation, an openly gay African American minister in Boston.

The honorable Mayor E. Denise Simmons of Cambridge, first African American lesbian to hold office doesn’t know him. And Cambridge’s former mayor, Kenneth Reeves, an African American gay male doesn’t know him either. None of Boston’s  political and religious allies to the African American LGBTQ community  knows him.

But most importantly Dubois has never been spotted at events important to the black LGBTQ community here in greater Boston and throughout Massachusetts, like our annual Bayard Rustin Community Breakfast, an HIV/AIDS awareness forum for LGBTQ communities of color and their family and friends. The Breakfast is a staple in our community and has been for seventeen years.

Every time Obama has nodded or winked at our community we have taken his gestures and even his words at face value to tethered our hopes to. But we are getting the feeling he’s not marching with us in our parade.

The California Supreme Court ruled again on same-sex marriage. This time it did to uphold Proposition 8, restricting marriage to one man and one woman. In a 6-to-1 decision the justices decided that Proposition 8 would remain part of the state constitution. And the 18,000 same- sex couples that ran to the altar to legally consecrate their nuptials before November 4, 2008, well they’re the lucky ones, since our right to marry can be so easily taken away by the pull of a lever.

For a fleeting moment in 2008 we saw democracy work for same- sex couples in California. In a 4-to-3 decision, the California Supreme Court in May of that year ruled that a “separate and unequal” system of domestic partnership for same-sex couples is not only blatantly discriminatory, but it is also unconstitutional.

The Court upheld the democratic process, offering same- sex couples “marriage” and not “marriage -lite ” with civil unions and put forth the following statement:

“In contrast to earlier times, our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation, and, more generally, that an individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights.”

But California’s same-sex couples and their allies knew the knot on this issue was not securely tied. Proposition 8, so rightly dubbed “Proposition Hate,” would be the determining factor. And it was.

With six months now passed since the historic day in November 4, 2008 that threw LGBTQ Americans under the bus, and symbolically removed black Americans, with the election of Barack Obama as this nation’s first African American president, from riding on the back of the bus, I’m confused in terms of where my seat is on this bus ride toward democracy being both African American and lesbian and bi-coastal.

Yes, I live in Massachusetts, the first state in the nation to legalize same- sex marriage. And on May 17 Massachusetts celebrated five years of marriage equality. But one of my jobs-coordinator of the Africa American Roundtable at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies and Ministry at the Pacific School of Religion – is in California. I’m free to marry as long as I stay within the five states that now offer me the right to.

The fight for marriage equality in the U.S. is similarly to my ancestors’ fight for freedom. In their day, before the Civil War in 1861, the U.S. consisted of nineteen free states and fifteen slave states. As a matter of fact, in the 2004 presidential race between John Kerry and George Bush where marriage equality was a hot-button issue, the election map results between Kerry’s blues states and Bush’s red states corresponded to the pre-civil war free states and slave states, respectively.

As LGBTQ Americans we’re not in slavery, but we are certainly in a civil war. Whereas President Lincoln acted on behalf of my ancestor’s civil rights, Obama is immovable on ours.

When Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked for a response to California’s ruling he told the Associated Press, “”I think the issues involved are ones that you know where the president stands.”

When society narrowly defines marriage as the union between a man and a woman, it is not only policing the sexual behaviors of lesbian and gay people, but society is also policing the sexual behaviors of heterosexuals. Handcuffing marriage to a heterosexual paradigm merely chokes its possibility of ever flourishing and lasting, especially as we are coming to understand the fluidity of not only gender and sexual identities but also of the constant changing configuration of family units.

But with heterosexual marriage being so sacred, opponents to same-sex marriage fail to see how it is constantly desecrated on any given weeknight by being slotted for family entertainment – television shows like “The Bachelor” that cavalierly join people together for high Nielsen ratings.

To me, democracy is an ongoing process where people are part of a participatory government working to dismantle all existing discriminatory laws that truncate their full participation in society. The work of democracy is rooted in justice and social change allowing us to see, along this troubling human time line, those faces and to hear those voices in society of the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the dispossessed.

Democracy can only begin to work when those relegated to the fringes of society can begin to sample what those in society take for granted as their inalienable right.

A government is ethically bankrupt when it legally frames a minority group’s civil rights as a ballot question.

If I waited for slaveholders to free my ancestors predicated on a ballot vote, we all wouldn’t be living in the America we know today.