>In support of Carrol's claim that the Black Panthers advocated
>working class racial unity, they inspired the establishment of the
>White Panthers in Michigan.
They advocated all kinds of unity:
http://www.ralphmag.org/BB/black-panthers.html
One night Jean Genet took too many Nembutals and danced in a pink negligée for Hilliard and three other Panthers. A French male translator who was present was so sickened by the spectacle that he prefers not to be named, but Hilliard himself, according to Angela Davis, felt that Genet was communicating something serious about sexual identity and its flexibility. Whatever Genet may have been up to, this well-substantiated event reveals that at least once he indulged in the camp transvestitism he had so admired and written about.
[...]
When Genet was later asked if his homosexuality had troubled the Panthers, he replied:
It certainly troubled me more than it did them. They found out very quickly that I was a homosexual. But not once did they make a remark, an allusion or a joke. It wasn't by tactfulness. Quite simply, I think they were just short on time and they couldn't have cared less what I am. When a Panther named Zayd came to meet me in Montreal, he had in his hands the first copies of Funeral Rites to come out as a paperback in America. He said to me laughing: "I read it on the plane." That's all he said. Period.
A month later, after public demonstrations by groups of American homosexuals and women's liberation people, the Black Panthers wrote to me, asking for an article on homosexuality because it was a subject they didn't understand very well and one in which I was better qualified to speak than they. Quite simply, I sent David a letter in which I explained to him that, like the colour of one's skin, homosexuality was a matter of faith; that it did not depend on us to be or not to be homosexuals.
By chance, or more likely by intent, Huey Newton, who had just got out of prison, published an article in the party newspaper in which he urged the Panthers to try to understand all minorities, to learn to distinguish between minorities and individuals and to distinguish among individuals who were revolutionaries and those who were not. Newton explained that the important thing was not whether to be or not to be a homosexual, but rather whether to be or not be a revolutionary, for by being revolutionaries, homosexuals could prove themselves potential friends.
[...]