Racism on the "Down Low?"

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) persons are discriminated against in America. There is no debate about that. Some argue that the discrimination is warranted, while others argue that it’s yet another form of systemic oppression that manifests itself in bigotry and perpetuates social injustice. Irrespective of those debates, and setting aside any implications that may or may not be associated with the HIV/AIDS crisis, there are unique circumstances facing GLBT persons of color.

This weekend, those issues are prominent at the Miami Beach Bruthuz retreat on South Beach. Part of the complexity involves the conceptual and semantic parsing of sexual orientation and sexual identity. As the Miami Herald reports, one of the organizers of the event noted that some men will not refer to themselves as gay; rather, they adopt a mindset that essentially boils down to “that’s just who I sleep with, but that’s not who I am.” This is true of GLBT persons of both genders and all races and ethnicities, but cultural norms of masculinity affect both gay and bisexual males uniquely.

The Miami Herald quotes author William Castillo as saying that there is a lot of pressure for gay men to ''get married, have children and carry on the family name. . . To be a man. Because being a homosexual is anything less than a man.''

Rapper Kanye West has spoken very eloquently on this issue. In an interview with MTV personality, Sway, West explained how he developed homophobic attitudes. (Pardon the long quote, but West developed the point carefully, rather than settling for a quip.)

After my parents got divorced and we moved to Chicago when I was 3, I would go see my father on Christmas, spring break and summer. My father was my everything, but during the rest of the time, my mother was my everything. Of course there's a good side to that, but the bad side of that is that people call you a mama's boy. It gets to the point that when you go to high school and you wasn't out in the streets like that, and you ain't have no father figure, or you wasn't around your father all the time, who you gonna act like? You gonna act like your mother. ... And then everybody in high school be like, "Yo, you actin' like a f--. Dog, you gay?" And I used to deal with that when I was in high school.

And what happened was it made me kind of homophobic, 'cause I would go back and question myself, like, "Damn, why does everyone else walk like this, and I walk like this?" People be like, "Yo fam, look at you. Look at how you act." If you see something and you don't want to be that because there's such a negative connotation toward it, you try to separate yourself from it so much that it made me homophobic by the time I was through high school. Anybody that was gay I was like, "Yo, get away from me." And like Tupac said, "Started hangin' with the thugs," and you look up and all my friends were really thugged out. It's like I was racing to try to find that constant masculine role model right there, right in front of me. I would use the word "f--" and always look down upon gays. But then my cousin told me that another one of my cousins was gay, and I loved him, he's one of my favorite cousins. And at that point it was kind of like a turning point when I was like, "Yo, this my cousin, I love him and I been discriminating against gays."

But everybody in hip-hop discriminates against gay people. Matter of fact, the exact opposite word of "hip-hop," I think, is "gay." Like yo, you play a record and if it's wack, "That's gay, dog!" And I wanna just come on TV and just tell my rappers, just tell my friends, "Yo, stop it fam."

J.L. King, who helped bring the term “on the down-low” to national attention when he appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show, urges men of color to come out of the closet. “You don't have to march in a gay pride parade or put a rainbow sticker on your car. But it's that kind of attitude that [allows] so many preachers to beat up on black gay men.” But Charles Martin, executive director of the South Beach AIDS project, rejects the label: “I hate that term. It demonizes gay black men.”

Therein lies the language component to this issue. It is interesting that there is a unique term for men of color who live separate lives so as not to undermine their religious and community norms. There are certainly many white men who live “on the down-low,” but the term is used almost exclusively for black men. In an ask.com column, Ramone Johnson considers whether the term is inherently racist. He implies that it is yet another attempt to blame black men for society’s woes – this time, the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Whatever the intent (conscious or otherwise) or effect, it is important to consider the way language is used to continually divide those who are denied access to power. One of the ways that Republicans have been able to convince persons of color to reconsider their allegiance to the Democratic Party is by positioning themselves as the champions of heterosexuality, which plays well in many churches and communities of color. In fact, we recently saw how African American presidential candidate Barack Obama played into the same kind of black religious disavowal of homosexuality in black communities – rhetoric that on the one hand silences black gay men’s admission of their sexual orientation, and on the other finding the need to exclaim one’s own heterosexuality.

The end result, of course, is a perpetuation of the existing power structure that has disproportionately disadvantaged people of color since the nation’s founding.