Gays and lesbians need to hear from all voices in the community

One of the drawbacks of working full-time while running a blog is how you miss interesting news. By the time you get to the new, it's already been covered to the point of over saturation.

On the other hand, this problem challenges you to find new things to cover and this is a huge boon, especially if you are black and gay and need to remind folks that in all the talk of ENDA, DADT, same-sex marriage, the black gay and lesbian community is a subset with specific needs and problems which, if we are not careful, get unintentionally ignored - such as the issue of self esteem.

All of the laws regarding ENDA, the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and the expansion of places where gays and lesbians can get marry don't mean @!&# if young gays and lesbian do not feel worthy enough to take advantages of these things. If they don't see people who look like them and whom they feel have an understanding of their problems in the public eye, there is a danger that they will be a permanent underclass in the gay who won't take advantage of any positive lgbt change.

With that in mind, I want to show the following Human Rights Campaign video of Dustin Baker. He was at the time of this video the only openly gay seminarian at the Howard University School of Divinity, tells of his experience in the black church as a gay man and how hes risen above it to find his calling in ministry.

There is no excuse why other stories like his aren't being widely heard in our community. Gays and lesbians are as diverse as the world in which we live and until we start addressing that fact, all of the pro-gay laws in the world won't get us where we need to go: