What we have seen for literally about the past two decades now, the black community being used as a pawn, being used as a wedge by the conservative right to try to carve gay and lesbian people out of the broader civil rights movement with the perception that the black community are the gatekeepers.

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In the Civil Rights Movement, legions of people worked in a multitude of ways for racial justice.

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Civil rights was a movement built by people.

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When we think of those famous words -- "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for the country" -- it was followed up by thousands of people wanting to join the Peace Corps, and the Civil Rights movement was already out there.

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But because the history of the gay civil rights movement has generally not been taken seriously by educators nor by the media, people are often uncertain about what exactly Stonewall was: why did the Stonewall Riots occur and what do they mean?

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And what we're seeing now is that there's a greater influence that's happening in base communities that are aligning more with traditional-values coalitions, which are much more conservative, and they're not really listening to their civil rights leaders, their politicians, the media, the people who participate in the broader social-justice movement, who are trying to show them the interconnectedness between this and their own fate.

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