Keith Boykin

Keith Boykin

Keith Boykin was born on August 28th, 1965 and is currently 59 years old. Keith Boykin was born in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Boykin attended Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School.

Keith Boykin is a film and TV producer, author, national political commentator, and ex-White House aide to President Bill Clinton.

After he graduated in 1992 from Harvard, he started working at a San Francisco law firm where he’d interned previously. But he left this position so that he could work for Clinton’s presidential campaign as the Midwest Press Director.

After Clinton won in 1992, he joined the Clinton White House to be a Special Assistant to the President, and also served as Director of News Analysis. After spending a bit of time in this role, he got promoted to Director of Specialty Media.

He helped arrange the very first meeting between a sitting US president and representatives from the LGBTQ community in 1993. This meeting included 8 members pulled from 3 different LGBTQ organizations. The March on Washington Committee, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and the Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership forum.

In 1995, he left his job at the White House so that he could write his first book, detailing the special burdens that black LGBTQ people experience.

Late in 1995, he would become the executive director of the National Black Gay and Lesbian Forum, a national non-profit that is dedicated to uplifting Black Gays and Lesbians. He found that it was an important professional experience.

By depicting what it means to be gay and black, One More River to Cross offers up this extraordinary window into this community which challenges this country’s acceptance of its minorities, both sexual and racial.

In the aftermath of the historic March on Washington in 1993 for lesbian and gay rights, Keith clarifies the relationship between gays and blacks in America by showing the “common ground” lives of these that are both gay and black.

Against a backdrop of the black experience and civil rights in America, he interviews Baptist ministers, other black lesbians and gays, and gay political leaders on issues regarding family, faith, discrimination, and visibility to determine what differences (both imagined and real) separate both communities. He points to evidence of precolonial and African same-sex behavior, along with figures such as Bayard Rustin and James Baldwin, in order to dispel the myth that homosexuality is a “white thang”, as his research suggests that blacks are much less homophobic than whites, despite the rhetoric of religion and rap.

With tales from his own experience along with that of other black lesbians and gays, he targets gay racism and black homophobia and suggests that conservative forces have substituted the common language of racism for homophobia so that they can prevent a potentially powerful coalition of gays and blacks.

Keith Boykin: Awards & Accolades

Boykin's book, For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Still Not Enough won the Stonewall Book Award, Non-fiction, in 2013.

Keith Boykin: F.A.Q