At the Intersection of Race and Orientation

Disillusioned Face? I need you again!

Ladies, gentlemen, variations thereof and none of the above, the honeymoon period is over. I say this with a heavy heart, but the inevitable has happened. My bleeding leftist heart is quick to attach itself to various causes and is just as easily disillusioned with every transgression my new comrades commit. I thought I'd learned after Julian Assange was accused of rape that no movement is perfect. Evidently I have not learned well enough. Ladies, gentlemen, variations thereof and none of the above, the LGBT movement has a race problem. It's here. It's queer. And we are not going to get used to it.





The realization came slowly. It was a list of LGBT celebs that was all white people here and there. I thought I was being over sensitive that the only public spokespeople I ever saw for the twilight persuasion were white and wealthy. I wrote a post a while back on the other side's strategic decision to capitalize on this racial disparity. Little did I dream that there was actually a problem.

Until this happened. And this. Now far be it from me to suggest that one troll and one idiot on Reddit is symptomatic of an entire culture's racial crisis. But in tandem with everything else, a pattern begins to emerge.

And what does this pattern look like? Between 58 and 70 percent of black voters supported Prop 8. Many LGBT folks of color are terrified to come out. We are at greater risk of losing our families or the support of our community, not to mention losing our fucking lives this is the 21st century Jesus H Christ. A black trans woman is currently in jail for not becoming another statistic and instead protecting herself against her attacker. And it is interesting to note that the countries that are the least accepting of homosexuality are not white-majority countries. Homosexuality is a criminal offense in the country of my parents' birth (Sri Lanka). Stonewall never happened for us. Progress has left us behind.

Is this a cause or effect of the LGBT movement's race problem? Many of my gay brethren are quick to point out that ethnic evangelical churches make up a decent amount of the anti-gay base. I'd like to ask my queer comrades where they think these churches came from.

Seriously. We've all heard of how sodom-tastic Ancient Greece was. Big whoop, they're like the founders of Western civilization (read: white). But ancient China, India, Japan, Russia, Arabia, Papua New Guinea, North and South America, Lesotho, Congo, and yes Sri Lanka were all either ambivalent or downright approving of homosexuality, transgenderism, or straight up gender fuckery. Hell, they even had gay marriage in Lesotho, China, Greece, and Egypt, a feat that we can't pull off nationwide. Like...damn. We got beat in the equality department by some guys who lived before germ theory. Get your shit together America.

They may not know what caused this but they know that love is love.

So what happened? I think you can guess. Following the colonization of other countries by Europe, laws penalizing "unnatural acts" (a Western concept, by the way) swept enslaved nations. Britain may have decriminalized sodomy, but her colonies still have that outdated blight upon their law books. Christian missionaries gleefully took up the white man's burden, building schools and infrastructure under the guise of education with the actual purpose of cultural erasure. The savages had to be saved from their savage ways, and one of the things they had to be saved from were the tender caresses of the same sex. Thus the conquering class succeeded in pitting brother against brother and set families against their LGBT members in the name of purity. This just goes to show, whitey ruins everything.

In the event that I ever run for office, that was a joke.

Let's rub salt in an old racist wound, shall we? Now that most of these former colonies are basically independent from their invaders, homophobic groups white and non-white will try to paint homosexuality as a decadent Western invention and one of the many cultural viruses inflicted upon a pure indigenous people. Here's a statement from a Sri Lankan political party alleging this. You can see the problem of historicity. It is homophobia and not homosexuality that was forced upon my and your and their cultures by a haughty and imperialistic West.

If you think about it, it's rather clever. Ever heard the saying "Divide and Conquer"? If you want to subjugate a group of people, you get them fighting among themselves. Soon you end up with the rich cosmic irony that causes a teenager to be beaten and kicked out of their home because his family unknowingly chose the ways of a foreign usurper over their long-forgotten cultural heritage, not to mention their own flesh and blood. If I sound a little bitter, that's because I am. But then again even I can appreciate the strategic thinking.

This is important. Many of my (especially American) readers are under the impression that we live in a post-racist society. If you think that racism no longer plays any part in the mainstream of our enlightened modern society, then I challenge you to name three American fictional TV/movie straight couples where the man is black and the woman is white. Holes doesn't count. You'll find that the opposite is quite common, and anyone familiar with American race relations will know why. Racism has receded, yes, but into the dark corners of our national consciousness so that only a bare ghost is detectable. But I assure my unaffected readers that we perceive it loud and clear. Ideas are important. Tropes are everything when you're trying to win minds, and the careful targeting of certain ideas is critical. Please be aware of this issue and the historical significance behind it.

I'd like to no longer be a criminal in the land of my fathers.