One of the problems, my dears, is that from the earliest days of queer activism, there has been a tension between the liberationists and the assimilationists. That's one way there's a parallel between the civil rights struggle and the queer one (think Black Panthers vs. NAACP).
The first culprit was The Advocate. In order to survive as a for profit business, the magazine had to develop a marketing niche. What they landed on were myths that are still repeated to this day, and often used to deny that discrimination against gay people exists in any systemic way they way discrimination based on skin color demonstrably does.
What are those myths (and do you repeat them)? Oh, gay people don't have kids so they have TONS OF DISPOSABLE INCOME! They LOVE to take vacations! They are better educated than the average American! They are so smart and so tasteful, they earn more money than straight people! The list goes on and on.
In other words, in order to prove to advertisers that it would be in their best interest to reach "the gay community" (even though the reference point for the creation of their pitch was based on a small percentage of Advocate subscribers), they began the process of establishing the word "gay" as meaning one specific thing: white, well-educated, affluent and MALE. Oh yes, they also ran with what has since been revealed to be an insanely overinflated population estimate (the old 1 in 10!) to make the market look much bigger than it is.
The gay liberationists, who came up out of the '60s anti-war movement, wanted to work in coalition with the pre-existing civil rights movement, and the women's movement. The assimilationists wanted to only focus on gay rights and not have to get bogged down in that sort of difficult collaborative work.
So what we have now is the assimilationists have basically held sway, (kind of like Microsoft in the computer world, not necessarily the best model but the one everybody has grown used to over the years). You have people fighting for the ultimate act of cultural assimilation (marriage!), and a reiterated image that this is an issue that applies to white, affluent gay men. Which is funny when you realize the majority of gay marriages in this country, in places where it's legal, is among lesbians.
So, the lack of coalition work will always come home to roost. Why WOULDN'T people of color presume this is a white male agenda and continue to ignore the very existence of gay people in their own communities? Sure, WE know there's a veritable rainbow of queer people out there, but marketing is the long-standing reason people without connections to gay communities don't know.
Personally, I don't have the energy or much investment in doing remedial work out there in the world, going over the issues that seemed so obvious to me 25 and 30 years ago but which were dismissed by the likes of the single issue Human Rights Campaign Fund as "too non-specific regarding gay rights." Gay rights. I was interested in working towards gay liberation. A liberation philosophy would have dovetailed perfectly with other liberation movements, and folks within them would have SEEN the similarities between our goals.
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