"A Strange And Disturbing Truth..."

The Black, Gay Community May Be Out - But It's Not Proud
I’m starting to think that internal racism could be part of the higher rates of interracial coupling in our community

The Guardian
Zach Stafford
5 July 2015

A little over a year ago, I got together with a group of fellow black, gay friends in Chicago and decided to try and throw a monthly brunch that was exclusively for men who looked like us.

For months, it kept growing without fail. People could invite whomever they wanted, but the main rule was, for the first few hours, the space had to be only men that identified as black and gay, and that other people could join after 3pm.

Over time, the brunch become a safe space for us, who generally felt like we had none – not in LGBT spaces, and not in black ones. Brunch is our place to breath a little easier.

Recently, one of the people that is a leader in making this brunch continue – now with less frequency – and I were talking about the love lives of the men involved.

“Everyone’s got a white man, girl,” he remarked to me. “When you going to get you one, too?” And the brunch began to feel a tad hypocritical.

While same-sex marriage is a fairly recent development – it just became legal nationwide in late June – we do have some data that gives insight into potential trends within the make-up of same-sex couples. And surprisingly, they look to already be more diverse – racially – than their heterosexual counterparts.

“Same-sex couples are more likely to be inter-racial/ethnic than are different-sex couples,” said Dr Gary Gates, research director at UCLA’s Williams Institute and a leader in studying same-sex couples, referencing his 2013 analysis that found same-sex couples twice as likely to be in interracial relationships than different-sex ones.

This analysis also found that 23% of same-sex couples were in a minority group, meaning that the vast majority of married same-sex people are white, with minorities most likely marrying a white partner.

When asked what’s motivating this trend, Gates said it was till too soon to tell. Some state agencies don’t (yet) track spousal gender, which won’t allow for a crystal-clear picture of demographic trends for a few years. It could be, he said, that a smaller pool of potential partners makes LGBT people less hesitant to date someone from a different ethnicity or culture.

The LGBT community – most specifically, the gay, male community as a whole – has come under fire lately for minimizing the racism that has long pervaded its ranks, with some Pride celebrations disrupted by Black Lives Matters representatives, there to remind the gay community of its racially diverse roots.

This racism is fueled by many factors, including ‘gayborhoods’ leading the gentrification of low-income minority communities, the focus on white gay men as poster-children for marriage and magazine covers, and the extreme casualness around saying things like ‘No blacks or Asians’ on gay dating apps, something that is unacceptable in the wider dating world.

Oh, and the constant obsession with painting black people as more homophobic even though most all anti-gay policies and laws have been led by white men.

So this idea – that LGBT minorities may be more comfortable being in relationships with white people than straight ones, even though the greater gay community has long been exclusionary – is bizarre and deserves some meditation.

I’ve tried to date fellow black men, but it’s been a struggle. After the US supreme court decision, my sister texted, excitedly, that we could plan my hypothetical wedding: Where’s your husband? she asked. Before I responded, I began to think about what this “husband” would look like now that I could have one, even in my home state of Tennessee. I saw a white man’s face in my mind’s eye.

Though the gay community pays lip service to being accepting of everyone, we’ve internalized the feeling that we are not equally beautiful or deserving of the same rights as others in our community.

This isn’t about me just not finding black skin attractive – that’s what many people say at bars while throwing back drinks. It’s because society at large has decided this. We as gay men, as people who have been fighting for so long to be seen as deserving of equality, have decided that we were willing to bring racism forward as long as what we imagined to be homophobia lessened.

And I am starting to think that this self-reinforcing racism could be part of the higher rates of interracial coupling in our community. However, I know it’s not that simple, especially since this doesn’t explain motivations for white, gay men marrying black, gay men.

But it’s worth thinking about, especially as our world becomes more and more aware of the incredibly deep roots white supremacy has in the US and beyond.

If we have learned anything during the fight for marriage equality, it’s that love is political, no matter what you might think. And our love should actually be used to fight battles that make things better for people like the fight for same-sex marriage just did.

As we enter a moment that some say signifies that we are now ‘equal at last’, I think it’s time to pause and consider what this love actually means, what it carries with it into the future and what drives us towards this love.

And if things much bigger than love have tainted love itself.

**********

"Fear Eats the Soul"