How my gay 'brother' helped me to be a better man

By LYLE V. HARRIS
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer

I'll never forget walking to lunch with Bernhart Gearhardt Mingia.
It wasn't unusual for women to stop and stare at him. Some would spin on their heels and say, right out loud, "Damn . . . he's fine."
People-watching is serious sidewalk sport in Washington, where Bernhart and I were glorified news clerks at The Washington Post in the 1980s. The crude social algebra of our relationship went something like this: Women liked Bernhart; I liked women; objects orbiting the same star sometimes collide.
He was a 6-foot-2 Ebony magazine cover: lean, athletic, caramel-colored, with thick and wavy black hair, a shiny black mustache, an easy and perfect smile. Bernhart was so magnetic to women, we nicknamed him "Heartburn."
Besides those pretty-boy looks, he was charming and smart and funny and brutally honest -- one of my best buddies at the paper. And he was gay.
He was the first gay man I'd ever called a friend. And because I'd gotten to know him, I could no longer harbor the hideous stereotypes I was weaned on and had clung to most of my life. Knowing him forced me to reconsider everything I thought I knew about black manhood.
It's because of Bernhart that I'm a recovering homophobe to this day.
While I'm a long way from cured, our friendship laid bare my irrational fears and suspicions about gay men for the ugly lies they always were.
Letting go of lies isn't easy. Like most straight men in America, my vocabulary was well-stocked with insults I wielded effortlessly for years. The epithets I'd inherited were enduring as family heirlooms. They were uttered casually among friends, relatives, scoutmasters and the good folks at my church in Brooklyn, N.Y. Even my mom used to call the gay men she knew on her job "funny."
Years later, it struck me as ironic that Bernhart rarely, if ever, talked about his sex life. Maybe he didn't want to, or felt uncomfortable bringing it up around me. But I doubt that. He wasn't "openly gay," any more than I was "openly straight." At one point, I remembered him saying there was a nice girl he met who wanted to marry him.
Yet Bernhart could not have completely avoided discussing his sexuality in America, particularly not in black America, where the concept is riddled with tricky, often perilous cultural land mines. History has left black men with more questions than most about their racial and sexual identity. Some are warped and painful to acknowledge, others encouragingly profound.
Are we Clifford Huxtable wannabes? Mandingo studs? Fearless freedom fighters? Emasculated and sometimes violent prisoners of racial circumstance? Icons of social conscience? Moet-swilling rappers? Zillionaire athletes? Absentee fathers?
Up through slavery, the civil rights movement and the recent ascendance of the middle class, our collective experience has shown that black men can be anything they want -- anything but gay.
That's the message I hear from men such as Danny Buggs. He's the former Avondale High School star and ex-NFL player the DeKalb County schools hired as a motivational speaker, a guide for young men struggling to define themselves.
Buggs was suspended recently for preaching a dubious, Bible-based brand of homophobia, telling a group of students that "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve."
Buggs' attitude may also have been echoed at Morehouse College on Nov. 3 when a student beat a schoolmate senseless with a baseball bat. According to a campus police report, the assailant said the victim had peeked at him in the shower.
These events are deeply troubling, but hardly unfamiliar. More than 20 years ago at Howard University, another prestigious black university, I pledged a fraternity that shunned members who even "acted gay." At Morehouse and at my alma mater, gay frat brothers are still mostly treated like outcasts.
As is the case in other minority cultures that have been marginalized by the mainstream, homosexuality remains the biggest male taboo. Gay-bashing may be illegal, but some African-Americans don't think it's the least bit immoral.
Bernhart wasn't into soapboxes, but he would have lectured such people sternly, wagging his crooked index finger in their faces, about the dangerous folly of prejudice, about how ignorance enslaves and enfeebles us.
I bet Bernhart would have also agreed with me that the civil rights struggle was not just a "black thing." The principles our parents and grandparents fought for also extend to the gay community. They deserve the same legal rights and social benefits as everyone else, he would have said.
But these men who carry around twisted old theories of black masculinity will never hear any of that from Bernhart. He died in July 17, 1987, of complications from AIDS, less than a year after I'd left the Post. My first gay friend also became the first I'd lost to that disease, although not the last.     More...