Racism Within the Gay Community

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion in New York's Greenwich Village. Below is an unpublished letter I sent to the Village Voice 25 years ago in response to an interview that appeared in its Gay Pride Issue. The letter was dated June 28, 1984. There is still some truth in what I wrote back then.


Dear Editor:
James Baldwin in his interview with Richard Goldstein (Village Voice, June 26), hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that "the gay world as such is no more prepared to accept black people than anywhere else in society."

Racism, as Baldwin knows, is very much a fact of life within the gay community. It is evident in the discriminatory admission policies of gay bars and discos across the country and in the near total exclusion of blacks and other third world gays in gay magazines and newspapers. The "invisibility"of black gays and lesbians is what prompted me to write articles in the gay press pointing up the fact that blacks are a vocal and active part of the gay community.

The white middle class male image being projected in these publications (and subsequently carried by the straight media) helps to foster the homophobic view in the black community that homosexuality, as well as AIDS, is a "white disease."

Until the white gay community is willing and able to accept black gays and lesbians as full and equal partners in the struggle against heterosexist oppression, they have no right to complain about homophobia. They too have become oppressors. That's not my idea of Gay Pride.