Homosexuality isn’t just a white thing, Josh Friedberg writes, and it’s up to us to challenge the stereotypes that continue to misinform and generalize.
This is a revised and updated version of a post originally published on the blog Stuff White People Do and the college newspaper the Earlham Word in 2010.
When you think of a gay man, what race and class do you associate with that image?
In 2001, World War II historian Allan Bérubé published an essay examining the perception of gay men and the consequences thereof. Bérubé wrote that when asked versions of the above question, his students invariably perceived gay men as “white and well-to-do.”
“In the United States today,” Bérubé wrote, “the dominant image of the typical gay man is a white man who is financially better off than most everyone else.”
Despite progress in gay rights, over ten years after the publication of Bérubé’s essay, “How Gay Stays White, and What Kind of White it Stays,” some things haven’t changed. Regardless of exceptions, the majority of people, at least in the U.S., still perceive gay men as white and wealthy. While this image stays ingrained for overt homophobes who believe gays are demanding “special rights,” the stereotype also permeates gay culture as well.
Bérubé examined how the image of gays as monolithically privileged manifested itself, in attempts to assimilate gays into mainstream society and in the curtailing of gay rights. He also examined what he called the “selling” of gay whiteness in order to garner favor from corporate and governmental authorities, as well as the use of “race analogies” that compare sexual marginalization to racial marginalization.
In the 1990s, politicians voted against gay rights measures, including in the battle over gays in the military, and then defended their votes by claiming that gays already have privilege — an idea which only makes sense if you conceive of gays as homogeneously white and wealthy.
And today, organizations like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) still sell the image of assimilation to try to prove that LGBT people are “just like everybody else.” Such efforts include the HRC’s Buying for Equality guide, which encourages consumers to support gay-friendly corporations.
To be sure, this sounds like a good idea, but the HRC has given awards to companies with documented histories of racist practices — like Abercrombie — thereby separating sexual oppression from racial or class-based oppression.
This example points to a larger problem: such an assimilationist ethic, which ignores the overlap between race, class, and sexuality, has resulted in the marginalization of gay people of color from activist discourse on gay rights.
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To be fair, in academia unprecedented numbers of gay and lesbian professors of color have gained prominence in the academy over the last two decades, so that certainly is progress.
But before Proposition 8 passed in 2008, banning gay marriage in California, gay and lesbian activists of color noted how racial discrimination within anti-prop 8 organizations silenced their ideas. As Kai Wright noted in an article for ColorLines magazine, these activists foresaw the passing of Prop 8 and tried to institute changes in the assimilationist strategies used to attempt to gain votes, but to no avail.
And today, the selling of gays as white and wealthy continues.
A few years ago Dwight A. McBride, a gay black professor who is currently a dean at Northwestern University, published an essay on “the gay marketplace of desire.” McBride described how pornography, print media, online dating services, and other institutions largely cater to white male consumers, often by using racist stereotypes about various gay men of color.
This is undoubtedly still the case; one look through a mainstream gay publication or website will confirm that.
And egregious race analogies continue as well: after Prop 8, one such magazine, The Advocate, published a story declaring on the cover that “Gay is the New Black.” The story’s author did not interview or mention a single gay black person and posed gay rights and black rights as comparable.
The problem with these analogies is that only those with white privilege and/or heterosexual privilege can compare racial marginalization to sexual marginalization. In particular, gay people of color can’t say that their oppression is like racial oppression OR sexual oppression, because they already are racially AND sexually oppressed.
Simply put, in such an analogy the existence of black gays and lesbians, for example, is not accounted for, but the existence of those marginalized by both race and sexuality arguably negates the entire validity of such a trivializing comparison.
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In addition, the myth that gay men are homogeneously white and wealthy yields a number of other myths. One is that some people of color have called homosexuality “a white thing,” dismissing the idea that gay men–as well as lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people–people exist in their communities.
Another is the myth that gay people (across race and gender) are uniformly privileged—which could hold true if you’re talking about race and class privilege among white and upper-class gay folks. But such a myth ignores the rights that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) people have long been denied, ones that heterosexuals can take for granted, including the rights to marry, to not face employment discrimination based around sexuality or gender identity, or to know that hate crimes against you can be treated as hate crimes, whether in terms of punishment or prevention.
So here’s what I’m asking all of us to do — challenge the stereotypes that are so prevalent, acknowledge race and class along with sexuality and gender identity, and help break down how gay stays white.
In his groundbreaking essay, Allan Bérubé asked, “How does the category ‘gay man’ become white? What are the whitening practices that perpetuate this stereotype, often without awareness or comment by gay white men?”
Bérubé’s death in 2007 should not leave such questions unexplored. We must educate ourselves, learning about racism and classism in addition to homophobia, sexism, and other types of oppression.
We must learn that ignoring or separating any type of oppression from another is a result of privileged ignorance, and it will remain so as long as gay stays white.
—Photo Paul-in-London/Flickr
Vocalyze
The greater visibility of one group of gay people may have something to do with differing levels of acceptance within various ethnic and racial groups. I would never say that people of color refuse to see any of their community as gay, but perhaps white people are a little more accepting of homosexuality than other groups in some cases? Maybe some groups more, maybe some less.
For example, I wonder if there’s a white counterpart to being on the downlow, i.e., having sex with other men but definitely not defining oneself as gay. That sounds like an example of reduced visibility.
This is not the sole explanation, of course. Racism and class may be even bigger factors. It’s just I don’t think it’s only a top-down, white dominance kind of thing. If LGBT people were highly visible within nonwhite communities, and white people were highly homophobic, then one would expect there to be a lot of racial stereotypes about nonwhite people being gay. For example: If gay black people are highly visible, and white people think being black is inferior and think being gay is inferior and white people dominate the media, one would expect the media to be totally full of gay black stereotypes. That doesn’t seem to be the case.
“I would never say that people of color refuse to see any of their community as gay”
*cough* Robert Mugabe *cough*
I’m not sure I agree with the comment about black-gay stereotypes. For whatever reason, token characters and stereotypes tend only to touch on one minority at a time. You can have token women, token blacks, token gays, but its borderline impossible to find black lesbian characters. Maybe it’d blow us caucs collective minds? Who knows how tv execs think.
If anything being black and gay represents a double jeopardy: if one group is at risk of racist attacks and the other of homophobic attacks, it follows that the intersection are at risk of both, and therefore have more to gain from hiding their orientation (even if they can’t hide their ethnicity). In addition: wealthy gays have more options than poor gays, live in Homophobia, Hicksville USA? Move to the big city. Someone threatening you? Call a lawyer. Homophobic treatment at work? Find a new job. Not that any of that is easy, or acceptable, but it must be doubly hard when you don’t have the cash or education to make it happen. And those things are going to fall heavier on blacks.
Not sure if “Iranian” counts as “of color,” but Akmadinajad said a few years ago that there are no gay people in Iran. (I’m not sure why the country needs such harsh laws against homosexuality if there aren’t any gay people there, but it’s probably one of those things I just don’t get because I’m just too Occidental.)
a really great article – thank you
it’s also good that it’s published here- one of the other intersections of this issue is of course with masculinity – hence the no fats, femmes or asians tagline, the continual identification of “non-masculine” behaviour with something unattractive etc…
@that guy – in gay world, rather than down low, terms like discrete/discreet are used (i know there’s a meaning difference there but use here tops (er…)) and there’s a proliferation of terms like str8 acting, dte, etc that all speak to “gay but in an obvious way”…
I’ll (hopefully) let someone else speak to the race part – from my understanding, and from media, those who are effeminate and latino/african american are punished for their difference in incredibly violent ways
Interesting, maybe it’s just because I grew up in Hawai’i where the chances of you having more white friends then non-white friends was next to impossible, I have never seen being gay as just an ‘affluent white male’ thing. Even in Chicago I’ve met more black and latino gay and trans males than I have white gay and trans males; in fact I’ve never been hit on publicly by gay white men like I have by openly gay black men, and I don’t hang out in the gay scene, this is on trains and at the grocery store.
I know some gay men, my best friend, Ryan for example, who fits the stereotype you are describing perfectly: an affluent, physically well sculpted, white male.
In my personal experience, I have never seen being gay as a distinctively ‘white’ thing, so your argument is brand new to me. In my mind the much more dangerous and pervasive stereotypes are the ones that paint gay men as always either effeminate and speaking with a lisp or as morale-less parties with no sense of commitment who will gladly go home with whoever they happen to make eyes to on the train or at the club that night.
No, being gay isn’t just a white thing. Nor is it just an (upper) middle-class thing, either. I do think, however, Peter Houlihan hit it on the head with the tokens in media generally only having one minority “feature”; and so, because white is default, it’s easier to just bleach the rainbow than show anything else.
Also, kckrupp: your experience in Hawai’i makes some sense; it’s the only majority-minority state. Your experience in Chicago, however, differs from mine. While I don’t disagree with you on the problem of the very pervasive effete, campy gay horndog stereotype, the vast majority of gay men I meet are white. I don’t often go to Boystown or Andersonville, but whenever I do, the bars tend to be whiter than not. Could this be because I live on the Northside, and fall more into the middle-class bracket? Quite likely. For most intents and purposes, I myself may as well be “white”, even though I’m not, and maybe that’s why.
For what it’s worth, I’m a gaysian. I didn’t come out until late college because until that point I didn’t really have a framework to understand what I was. To wit: I was told by my mom (when younger, before she knew) that both serial killers and gays were “American” (read: Caucasian) “problems”, no doubt because every example ever shown on TV for either category were quite white. Not only did the gays not look like me, they also didn’t act like me: campy, loud, stylish, outgoing, and not bookish, everything I was not. If that’s what gay meant, that wasn’t me. Other gaysian friends of mine have said similar things: they see loud, campy, white stereotypes, and it’s generally not until later, or meeting virtually invisible gay Asians, that they realize that those stereotypes don’t even show a fraction of the full picture.
And of course, because there aren’t that many famous and out gay minorities (I can really only quickly think of one Asian example), that leads to more erroneous statements like my mom’s.
I won’t even pretend to know what those in lower socioceconomic strata have to go through. I know full well their concerns are different; I frequently see young gay youth of color come up from the South Side trying to find a place where they are welcomed, but even in Boystown their differing classes and races doesn’t make for the smoothest of mixes.