Crossing the Gay Color Lines

Former BET producer Kevin E. Taylor, who is now an author and pastor at the Unity Fellowship Church, a large congregation of gay blacks, agrees with Fixx. "As a black gay man it's unnerving for me to hear white gay men so quickly run to civil rights," said Taylor, "when you can tell somebody's black from a mile away, so that any insidious racism, any bias that you have, you're allowed to pick it up and put it on before the person ever opens their mouth."

Polk, Fixx, McCullom and Daniels all feel that the challenges they face as African Americans in our culture are greater than those they face as gay men. "For me, it boils down to an issue of privilege," Polk explained. "White gay people are just as privileged as white straight people."

Daniels seems to understand this may not be a popular opinion among some white gay people. "It's not cool to call the race card," he said, "because it's politically incorrect to say that that's an issue anymore."

Taylor is the lone dissenter here, and pointed out that gay people don't have families who understand their struggles in the same way that black people do; in fact many gays lose their families in the process of coming out. "Being black comes with a built-in support system," Taylor said. "Gay doesn't."

Taylor found the media coverage of the Washington affair
two-dimensional; the media barely mentioned Washington's groundbreaking role as a gay character in Spike Lee's 1996 film Get on the Bus. Set during the Million Man March, the film took enormous heat from black religious leaders for its inclusion of a gay couple ( Washington played one of the partners). It was a courageous role for any actor at the time, and doubly so for an African American one.

When the film was released, Taylor interviewed Washington for BET and found him to be eloquent and sensitive on the issue of sexuality, describing how he fought with producers to ensure the character wasn't a dismissible stereotype. "He was really sweet and forthcoming, and knowing that this would be an inroad for black gay men," Taylor said.

He believes that more effectively including this part of Washington's body of work could have led to a more productive discussion after the Grey's Anatomy fiasco. Then "it becomes a dialogue," Taylor pointed out. "It becomes: How could you have been so sensitive a decade ago, and then this rolls out of your mouth in the new millennium?"

But what about Tim Hardaway? The judgment here is unanimous. Polk offered, "He deserves whatever he gets." Fixx said, "He was an embarrassment to himself and the whole NBA franchise."

Taylor said the response was swift — as it should be. "What I appreciated about the NBA is they said hatred is not acceptable as it relates to our code of honor," he said. And Taylor feels "hatred" is the way to frame this discussion, especially if you're trying to reach out to African Americans.

"That's why I don't like the word homophobia," Taylor explained. "We've got to use the word 'hatred.' Because you can't tell a grown man that he's scared of a grown man. … But when black folk in Christianity hear the word 'hatred,' they are put in check. Homophobia is just another excusable construct."

The White Gay Image

Media images such as those mentioned here tend to frame this debate for the larger culture, and it is the very images the gay community creates that Taylor thinks may explain some of the black community's resistance to the entire concept of gay rights.

"We [as gays] want to put our best image out there, and our 'best' images can be very in-your-face to poor black people," Taylor explained. "They can be very arrogant as it relates to two white gay men on a beach outside their luxurious home." In other words, "It always comes back to the unspoken anger of other communities that are pissed at the white gay male community for white, male privilege."

Taylor said that going through many gay magazines becomes a tour of exclusively white men enjoying “cruises and beach houses and resorts, saying we've got money, we've got money, which causes this insidious invocation of white, male privilege,” explains Taylor. “And now you've got two of them. Now you've got Skip and Kyle!”

He added, "At the end of the day, tight-ass Will Truman [Will & Grace] is just another rich white man."

Polk also sees the exclusiveness of white images as an issue. "With Noah's Arc, for example … during the first season of that show, we got no covers of any of the national gay magazines," he said. "Meanwhile you had Dante's Cove [a program airing on here! with a predominantly white cast] on the cover of almost all of them. And we have hot guys on Noah's Arc! … We've got the eye candy if that's what it's about."

But instead, said Polk, the magazines are full of the same “blandly attractive, white model-looking guys in bathing suits. … I call them the Aberzombies,” Polk observes archly, alluding to the vacant models of the Abercrombie and Fitch ads.

Ultimately, Polk was told point blank by an editor of Genre, a gay men's magazine, that the publishers didn't want African Americans on the cover because they believe covers featuring African Americans won't sell. (Last July, The Advocate did put Noah's Arc on the cover in conjunction with its Season 2 premiere.)

The lack of diverse gay images is linked, Taylor believes, to why gays may be losing the marriage debate within the black community. "We, the rainbow people, should have made sure that this conversation [about marriage] started with a rainbow coalition," Taylor said. “So that the black people would look down and go ‘he looks like my son.' So that Latinos would go ‘wait, wait, wait, carino, what are you doing here?'”

Instead, the predominant image for quite some time was that of "the wonderfully suited white gay men," Taylor pointed out. "When the white man stood at the table and said, 'Oh let me have my basic rights,'” explained Taylor, “black people felt like, 'Mr. Privilege, you already have most of 'em — shut up!'"