The black divide: African-Americans who refuse to support equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians are shoving their own history back into the closet.

It certainly looks as if Republican mastermind Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, has found his "wedge issue"--at least as far ms African-Americans are concerned. Gay marriage, the sensation that's sweeping the nation from San Francisco to New Paltz, appears to have split black America right down the middle.

"I'm offended that they're comparing this to civil rights," says the Reverend Jeffrey Brown, a Baptist minister from Massachusetts, the epicenter of the same-sex marriage battle. "Marriage is not a civil right, and the struggle of gay and lesbian people cannot be compared to the struggle of blacks." Meanwhile in Los Angeles, the Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson has called any attempt to parallel the gay marriage movement with the African-American struggle "offensive" and declared the civil rights movement to be "not about sex."

By contrast, author, lecturer, and frequent op-ed commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson told ABCNews.com, "When African-Americans say, 'Wait a minute, we are going to discriminate against you; we, in fact, don't see you as equal to us,' that is a dangerous, dangerous slope that you're going down." Likewise, the Reverend Ron Sailor, a minister and a Georgia state legislator, says, "Discrimination--whether it shows up in African-Americans versus white Americans 60 years ago or whether it shows against homosexual people today--is wrong." On March 23, testifying at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Bush's proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, U.S. representative John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, called Bush's push for the antigay amendment "an irrational and radical step that seeks to undermine the civil rights of our citizen." And one day later, Martin Luther King's widow, Coretta Scott King, tom a New Jersey audience, "A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing, and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriages."

While the three largest associations of black ministers in the Boston area have held news conferences in front of the statehouse denouncing same-sex marriage, state representative Byron Rushing, a black Episcopalian, has called the argument that gays were never enslaved and therefore should not be compared with blacks "illogical." He continues, "These black clergy have redefined civil rights to say that it includes black people only. I'm not saying the experience of African-Americans was the same as gays and lesbians, though there are similarities."

And that in turn leads to what might well be the last straw. The Reverend Jesse Jackson--while visiting Harvard University for a recent event celebrating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the May 17, 1954, U.S. Supreme Court ruling that separate schools were inherently unequal--called the comparison of the two movements "a stretch" because "gays were never called three-fifths human ha the Constitution."

Being gay, black, politically active, and 57 years of age, it behooves me to remind the good reverend that he wouldn't be speaking at Harvard, or anywhere else for that matter, were it not for a gay black man named Bayard Rustin. A far more important leader in the civil rights movement than Jackson ever was, Rustin planned the historic 1963 March on Washington and stood right next to Martin Luther King Jr. when the great man delivered the "I have a dream" speech, the most famous oration since the Gettysburg Address.

Jackson and other gay rights detractors would likewise do well to remember the pivotal role played in the civil rights movement by a gay African-American writer named James Baldwin, whose novel Another Country and essay "The Fire Next Time" were the most widely read texts of the civil rights era. Likewise, the most famous play to emerge from the struggle, A Raisin in the Sun, was written by a black lesbian named Lorraine Hansberry. And casting back a bit further, one finds countless gay and lesbian African-Americans of note. Indeed the fabled Harlem Renaissance whose leading lights included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston--was in many respects a gay and lesbian movement in all but name.

Needless to say, calling things by their right name can be a tricky business--especially for a community chary of "doing stuff in front of the white people." Saying "gay" out loud has long been considered bad form. Or at least it was until 1990, when a brilliant young filmmaker named Marlon Riggs produced Tongues Untied, a matchless documentary-essay about what it meant for him and countless others to be gay and black. Riggs demanded that African-Americans recognize and, most important, respect those same-sex-oriented souls among them instead of forcing people to "choose" their identity--guess which "choice" is the fight one or pitting the civil rights and gay rights movements against one another in competition. When he died of AIDS in 1994, he left a legacy of racial and sexual honesty that we all still have much to learn from.

"Speaking truth to power" is a difficult business. Speaking truth to black power, even more so. Because he was gay, Bayard Rustin had to defer credit for the 1963 March on Washington to A. Philip Randolph. Because he was gay, James Baldwin was attacked by a world-be black radical named Eldridge Cleaver. Merely mentioning Langston Hughes's gayness is anathema to many straight African-Americans. Likewise, the fact that famed choreographer Alvin Alley was gay and died of AIDS.

Even at a time when the gay-and bisexual-themed novels of E. Lynn Harris top the African-American best-seller list, some forces in the black community hold back, treating gayness as "white" and fostering the African-American closet of the "down low"--a thriving and willfully invisible community of black men who have sex with men but don't identify as "gay"--a phenomenon that surely has Marlon Riggs revolving in his grave, as would the spike in HIV infection rates it has produced. Likewise the fact that "hip hop"--many of whose practitioners are "on the down low"--sells black identity as antigay by definition to both an African-American audience and an even larger one of sexually insecure white teenage males.

As might be expected, efforts are being made to end this "family quarrel" and its multifarious consequences. Organizations like the National Black Justice Coalition are taking up the same-sex marriage cause, staging demonstrations in its support, and much more will doubtless be said and done in the future. But the most important truth to recognize is the one Marlon Riggs came to know: "It's not sufficient to wage war just with the demons within but also with the demons outside." Or, as he once dryly remarked, "Asking me to choose between my identity as a gay man and my identity as a black one is like asking if I prefer my right ball to my left ball."

Those who would ask us to do so have no balls at all.

Ehrenstein is the author of Open Secret: Gay Hollywood, 1928-2000.