What a difference a couple of decades make.

When a quarter million people converged on the National Mall in 1983 to mark the 20th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, queers demanded the right to join in. Despite strong opposition from the event’s organizers, they wedged Audre Lorde into the speaking line-up.

Ten years later, gay activists compared their civil rights struggle to that of African Americans in the build up to their own march on Washington, and black leaders denounced it. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. so eloquently put it, old line black activists saw gay rights as “Liberace in Rosa Parks drag.”

But things couldn’t have been more different at last weekend’s rally marking 40 years worth of pursuing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream. Rather than pushing their way in, gay activists, black and white, were invited to sit on the event’s organizing committee. National Gay and Lesbian Task Force chief Matt Foreman landed a speaking slot between the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson—about as primetime as it gets.

Foreman was in fact one of at least three openly gay speakers on the program, and he was introduced with an emphatic statement about the importance of embracing gay men and women as allies. What’s more, an LGBT pre-rally and “teach-in” was one of the day’s largest co-events.

By all signs, the long and tortuous debate over whether or not gays are part of the larger civil rights movement has ended. We’ve arrived. And none too late, because as Foreman deftly noted, queers are destined to become “the Willie Hortons of the 2004 election cycle.” One speaker after another at the LGBT pre-rally reminded listeners that we’ll need allies to make it through with our few rights intact.

I was too young to go to the ’83 civil rights march and too straight to notice the ’93 queer one. So I do not have the comparative sense that would allow me to fully appreciate the victory this weekend represented for both the gay community at large and the black gay community in particular. But as I strode past the reflecting pool on Saturday behind a banner that declared “We Walk With You,” attaining allied status felt like an odd sort of achievement. After all, as a black man, King’s legacy is my own, not something to be extended to me. I’m not looking to be an ally; I want to be acknowledged as part of the family.

You could argue I’m splitting hairs. The important thing is that crucial LGBT issues make it onto the progressive political agenda and, as the speakers kept reminding us, that sexuality not divide King’s “beloved community” of humanity.

These things are significant, but it is no less relevant that the vast majority of faces at the queer rally and teach-in were not black. This in Chocolate City, which is 60 percent African American and home to arguably the nation’s most fully-realized black gay community––the concept of black gay pride originated in Washington.

As I stood on the LGBT rally’s edge grumbling about this disparity, a friend offered the age-old rejoinder to such criticism: “We don’t do it like the white gays.” Black queers were at the rally, she assured me, and they were out; they just didn’t need an arch of pink balloons and an oversized rainbow flag to prove it.

Others would put this less delicately: gay-identified blacks like me have driven a wedge between themselves and the larger African American community by pushing their sexual identity over their racial one.

But few black mothers at the event felt it necessary to downplay the maternal part of their lives in order to join the party. Ditto for black labor leaders, whose issues were emblazoned on NAACP placards and front and center in the event’s manifesto. Black veterans did not obfuscate their dual belonging, and youth activists proudly displayed their identification with hip hop culture.

The result is that all of these groups are accepted as vital parts of a varied black world, and their political and cultural concerns are synonymous with those of the larger black community.

Sexual freedom, however, remains an issue for the black community’s allies to address. The champions of sexual freedom march alongside black America, not within it. And yet, many of gay America’s most pressing problems are as rooted in race and economics as they are sexual politics. What subsection of the black community needs the equal access to healthcare that the NAACP demanded more than young gay men, among which studies have found as many as one third to be living with a fatal disease that costs as much as $12,000 a year to treat? And laws barring workplace bias based on sexual orientation are most relevant to the low-wage workers the march’s economic justice platform seeks to protect.

The week before the march, three transgendered women were separately attacked in D.C., two of whom were murdered––bringing the city’s total number of reported trans hate-murders in the last year to five. All of these women were poor blacks and Latinas. From job opportunities to healthcare to violence, transgendered African Americans are perhaps the furthest away from realizing King’s dream.

And theirs is not just an issue of sexuality and gender. The women murdered last week did not have the economic safety net many white transgendered men and women have––at least two of the attacks are believed to have come at the hands of johns. A recent survey of 250 transgendered folks in D.C. found 40 percent of respondents hadn’t finished high school and another 40 percent were unemployed. Half had no health insurance, a quarter were HIV-positive, and 35 percent reported having considered suicide. If there’s a place where economic justice is needed, it’s in this population.

These issues remain on the fringe of the black community’s political and social agenda because black gay people have allowed them to be. We leave the fight for sexual freedom and its related economic justice to white gay activists, and thereby encourage the notion that these are issues relevant to the black community’s white allies rather than its black brothers and sisters. It’s a sadly poignant fact of history that the march coincided with the official demise of the only national black gay political organization, the National Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum. At the ’83 march, that group’s predecessor led a crowd of queers that marched behind a banner declaring themselves “as proud of our gayness as we are of our blackness.”

Now, gay folks merely “walk with” the black community.