Blog Post #2 – MB

The most memorable element of this week’s activities for me was how the Pascoe reading “Dude, You’re a F*g” acknowledged and explored the relationship between homophobia and race, and homophobia and gender, as opposed to merely homophobia and sexuality. It was interesting to examine homophobia not only as anti-homosexual bigotry, but as a tool of racism, misogyny, and transphobia (through fear of gender nonconformity). Then, in Bronski et al.’s “Myth 12: People of Color Are More Homophobic Than White People”, there is an almost inherent mindset that homosexuality and nonwhiteness are exclusive identities – this can be seen in the myth’s reliance on pitting the black community and the homosexual community against each other, which demotes the existence of black LGB individuals to that of an inconvenient side note for those who would perpetuate this myth.

One question that Thursday’s class raised for me was why people of color more readily identified themselves as LGB than white people, when LGB representation is predominantly white and would presumably make it easier for white LGB folk to be openly LGB.

Something I would want to explore in relation to this question would be the historical intersection of whiteness and homosexuality, as opposed to nonwhiteness and homosexuality – since it is my understanding that homophobia became more prevalent in many non-European cultures directly as a result of Western colonization. For me, it is hard to separate transphobia and colonization when the gender binary is an explicitly European construct that became enforced through Westernization of colonized cultures. I would like to know why heterosexuality became such an inherent value to European cultures (especially in religion), while it originally wasn’t in many non-European cultures. Perhaps belonging to a Western culture/colonizer culture is what makes it more difficult for white people to be openly LGB, despite white LGB folks having greater representation in the media. Another perspective on this might be that sexuality is not necessarily visible, the way that race is perceived to be. For non-whitepassing people of color, there is no way to conceal their marginalized identity, so it may be easier to also be open about their LGB identity. For white people, it may be harder to admit to membership to a marginalized community if they could choose not to.