“That’s Hattie McDaniel,” the Indian woman working the counter at the Post Office told me when she showed me my choice of stamps. “George Clooney mentioned her last night at the Oscars. She was the first black woman to …”

Yes, I knew — to get the Oscar. And I knew also what Clooney hadn’t mentioned:

When McDaniel picked up her award for Best Supporting Actress, she was the first black woman to ever set foot in the Coconut Grove who wasn’t behind a serving tray and that even in progressive, Jewish-humanitarian Hollywood, Hattie had to make her long walk to stage from the darkest, farthest, most removed part of the restaurant, the very back, practically the coat-check room.

Hattie McDaniel is one of many reasons — some of the others are Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Haviland, Butterfly McQueen — that Gone With the Wind can never be remade. Her Oscar-winning Mammy was big, bossy, formidable, warning the teenage Scarlett to finish her vittles before she went out:

“I done told you and told you, you can always tell a lady by the way she eats in front of people like a bird. And I ain’t aimin’ to have you go over to Mista John Wilkes’ house and eat like a field hand and gobble like a hog” — going basso profundo on that word hog.

But it wasn’t only the written script. It was her deep-voiced, orchestrated Negro phrasing of what seemed like ad-libbed interjections: “Ain’t fittin! Ain’t fittin …” Pausing for the right syncopation, finding it: “Ain’t fittin!”

A later generation criticized her for playing maids and mammys — “female Uncle Tom’s.” “What did you want me to do?” she replied in exasperation. “Play a glamor girl and sit on Clark Gable’s knee?”

It was 1940, after all. She was, as she herself proclaimed, “always lucky.” And in an America where she was one of perhaps three public black faces, everything she did or said had to “uplift the race.” Gooder than good. Carrying the whole people on her motherly back.

Still Hattie knew how to have fun, to the tune of four husbands, a grand Hollywood house and that flirtatious rustle of the red petticoat she showed off with a giggle in an unforgettable GWTW moment. She was, in a strange way, white Hollywood’s penance for what Edward Albee recounts in his play The Death of Bessie Smith. The bluesy big-bodied Bessie died outside of an emergency room, right there on the pavement, when a whites-only hospital in Mississippi refused to treat her after a car accident.

Hattie was big Bessie reborn. “That’s a powerful lucky rabbit’s foot I got, ” McDaniel said of snagging the role in GWTW. And now here she was in my hand, on a U.S. stamp.

I write this because her story resonates with me as a gay man. The black struggle for civil rights leads and prefigures our own struggle. The details are different, the discrimination more instant, more total. But the discrimination against gay people has been sharp enough. Some of our lives have been shrunk by it, and some of our lives have carried on regardless. But we too have died under it.

It’s a comparison that seems obvious — except to many black people, who have failed to draw the universal, rather than the particular, lesson from their passage into the mainstream. Hattie McDaniel was their herald, their scout into a rich, menacing frontier. And in an oblique way, she was ours as well.

Rita Dove, a Poet Laureate during the Clinton years and herself a back woman, remembers Hattie’s long walk to the Oscar stage in a poem she wrote for her latest volume American Smooth:

“Hattie McDaniel arrives at the Coconut Grove late,” the poem begins, “in aqua and ermine.” The actress has gardenias on her sleeve and “stars and rhinestones clipped to her brilliantined hair.” Dove calls out the names of the maids she has played: “Beulah & Berta & Malena & Carrie & Violet & Cynthia & Fidlia.” And a few lines later, her iconic role: “Dear Mammy we can’t help but hug you, crawl into your generous lap.”

The closing lines sum up the longer walk out of Kansas City that got McDaniel to the Coconut Grove in the first place: