If gay means racist then this is literally us
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“No more excuses. It’s time to stop conflating being gay with being a leftist and start learning how to protect ourselves.”
LGBTQ groups last week issued a statement, led by the Human Rights Campaign, calling for the integration of anti-racism and an end to white supremacy into the LGBTQ movement. “As we’ve all seen over the past week, protests can too quickly turn into chaos and when police aren’t there to help you, who will?
Especially when it was black and brown trans foremothers like those at Stonewall who first chopped the wood and threw the bricks. When confronted, they simply became defensive.
“It was not my intent to cause distress,” another user explained.
On gay dating apps like Grindr, many users have profiles that contain phrases like “I don’t date Black men,” or that claim they are “not attracted to Latinos.” Other times they’ll list races acceptable to them: “White/Asian/Latino only.”
This language is so pervasive on the app that websites such as Douchebags of Grindr and hashtags like #grindrwhileblack can be used to find countless examples of the abusive language that men use against people of color.
He is the producer, co-creator and co-host, with Kaila Story, of Louisville Public Media’s "Strange Fruit: Musings on Politics, Pop Culture & Black Gay Life," an award-winning weekly podcast focusing on social justice and pop culture.
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Part of that fieldwork was focused on understanding the role Grindr plays in LGBTQ life.A slice of that project – which was recently published in the journal Deviant Behavior – explores the way gay men rationalize their sexual racism and discrimination on Grindr.
‘It’s just a preference’
The gay men I connected with tended to make one of two justifications.
Scruff, another gay dating app, requires users to reveal more of who they are. “Racism has caused inequities around health, social and economic issues, and education.”
As an example, Fowlkes said the D.C.-based Whitman-Walker Health is important, but urged contributions to other groups like Us Helping Us, which seeks to improve the lives of gay black men.
Fowlkes also pointed out in D.C.
during the coronavirus pandemic, 70 percent of the people who have tested positive for coronavirus have been African Americans, although black people make up 42 percent of the population.
“It means that you have to put resources in the African-American communities to close the gap of health disparities, and that means to invest money, it means to shift money around that has traditionally gone to large institutions and putting them into the black community,” Fowlkes said.
Protests in the days after Floyd’s killing continued throughout the country.
In St. Louis, retired police chief captain David Dorn, who’s black, was fatally shot when responding to an alarm at a pawnshop during looting.
Rob Smith, a black gay Iraq war veteran and a member of the pro-Trump group Turning Point USA, talked about the Second Amendment when asked what the gay community should be doing to address police brutality.
“Any gay people who want to help need to realize that the best thing we can do as American citizens is to protect our Second Amendment right to bear arms,” Smith said.
While social scientists have explored racism on online dating apps, most of this work has centered on highlighting the problem, a topic I’ve also written about.
I’m seeking to move beyond simply describing the problem and to better understand why some gay men behave this way. Philadelphia recently required the owners and staff of 11 gay bars to undergo anti-bias training.
As of this week, the statement now has more than 100 signers.
Fowlkes, however, was skeptical about the statement, saying it’s not the first time LGBTQ groups have expressed solidarity with black people, but then didn’t follow through.
“We had a retreat once to deal with racism,” Fowlkes said. More specifically power and resource sharing.”
The oppression of LGBTQ people of color hurts the very foundation of Pride Month
Gay racism is nothing to celebrate this Pride Month.
“Let’s see if they put their money where their mouth is.”
Asked specifically what the Human Rights Campaign should be doing, Johns referenced the 2019 Democratic presidential candidate town hall hosted by the organization, when a black transgender activist grabbed the microphone to make her voice heard.
“There was a black woman, Blossom C.
Brown, who was shut down, who had to literally take the mic from Don Lemon, and talk about the erasure of black trans women in a space that was designed for queer people,” Johns said. In 2018 there were nearly 30. But the reality is that white privilege functions the same way in queer spaces just as it does elsewhere.
Only recently as their narratives finally begin to get mainstream attention have most white LGBTQ people learned that it was actually black and Latinx drag queens and trans women like Marsha P.
Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and Miss Major who literally and figuratively threw those first bricks that started a movement.
More: What a town's 20-year struggle with 'Fairness' says about rural LGBTQ rightsDespite their position as trailblazers of many of our social and political gains, the plights of our trans siblings, especially black trans women, are largely dismissed and disregarded by the mainstream gay movement and the people within it.
The life expectancy for transgender women of color in the U.S. is just 31 years old.
In addition to anti-transgender violence, black and brown trans folks face police harassment, homelessness, disproportionate levels of poverty and unemployment, and significant health disparities and barriers to healthcare.
Of the major national LGBTQ advocacy organizations, the leaders are currently and have historically been primarily white gay men.
This is true even for people of color who occupy some degree of celebrity within the LGBTQ world.
Perhaps Grindr has become particularly fertile ground for cruelty because it allows anonymity in a way that other dating apps do not. You must also challenge the racist speech and attitudes of your friends like the kind that black folks frequently encounter in gay bars and nightclubs.
His image of his ideal partner was so fixed that he would rather – as he put it – “be celibate” than be with a Black or Latino man.
The most common was to simply describe their behaviors as “preferences.” One participant I interviewed, when asked about why he stated his racial preferences, said, “I don’t know.