Fellas, Everything is Gay

June is LGBTQIA Pride/History Month.

It is a good time to remember that Pride started out like many “history” months started: with protest and rebellion against a system that sought to erase Queer folks from existence. The first Pride was a physical uprising. The NYPD regularly raided and violently shut down bars in New York City who catered to non-cisgendered patrons. They would inevitably beat and arrest the patrons in the process, and finally, on June 28^th, 1969, the patrons of Stonewall Inn fought back. Marsha P. Johnson, a Black trans woman is rumored to have picked up the first brick. The uprisings lasted for nearly a week. People were sick of the sanctioned abuse. These protests were helmed by Black and Brown Trans women, and we must never forget that. Today Pride is a monthlong worldwide celebration of life and survival.

How should a cis-straight person celebrate Pride?

Cheering on your Queer friends is always a good idea. Going to a pride parade or festival is always fun, but donning some rainbow shirts and make-up are only surface support. Pride month is a great time for Cis-straight people to examine all the transphobia and homophobia that we’ve internalized throughout our lives.

“Masculinity” and heteronormativity have been deemed toxic, with good reason. This is more than the near farcical attempts that Boosie Badazz makes to sound wise any time he sees Lil Nas X do anything in public, like breathe or eat. Milquetoast white nationalist Tucker Carlson dedicated an entire documentary to the fear of men “ending”, with ridiculous ways to become more masculine, like bathing one’s genitals in UV light.

Everything deviant from standard “man” things is an indicator of a man’s “gayness”. I’ve been told eating brunch, wearing a pink shirt, riding a bicycle, cooking, wearing gloves while cleaning my house, drinking water with lemon in it, driving a Japanese car are all “gay”. Someone told me that a man wearing short shorts to gain attention from women is “gay”…so getting women to be attracted to you is gay. If you ever see a person on social media ask, “Fellas is it gay to…”, some ridiculously innocuous activity will follow…We cis men are NOT okay.

Queerphobia

Queerphobia is as common in the Black community as in general society, but with the added burden of institutionalized racism. Try to reason with someone deeply queerphobic, and they will bring up horrifying stories of how enslaved men would be sodomized and castrated by torturous overseers and plantation owners. They will bring up how sexual assault of young boys may have led them to now seek out other men or “choose” to identify as women or non-binary when they are adults. They will talk about how European colonists brought homosexuality to African lands to “weaken” family units and further destroy communities. Moreover, they will talk about how Hollywood will cast Black men as gay or in drag to “emasculate” Black men and make a joke of them.

There is a lot to unpack regarding Black masculinity and the contentions that people make.

Hollywood uses the trope of Black men dressing as women to entertain. Tyler Perry didn’t invent the genre. Flip Wilson’s “Geraldine” character was a hit on his variety show in the 1970s. Part of Jamie Foxx’s popularity was playing Wanda on In Living Color. The 1990s had a few movies where Black male comedians dressed in drag for laughs, be it She’s the Man or Big Momma’s House. However, none of these characters tools to “feminize” Black men. They are simply products of comedians doing their job of trying to get a laugh out of us. At worst, they are just another extension of minstrelsy and buffoonery that Hollywood DOES like to perpetuate. What could really be examined about these characters is how they negatively stereotype Black women.

Today when Black queer characters are on the screen, perhaps the goal is not indoctrination, but inclusion. Black queer people exist in real life. Why shouldn’t they be seen in media? Even if a producer simply “inserted” a gay Black character into a show, we seem to forget how effective seeing someone in a positive light in popular culture affects the real lives of people who resemble that character.

I have older friends whose first positive depiction of a Black character was from seeing George Jefferson or Lt. Nyota Uhuru on TV. The slander they were fed by their parents about Black people was harder to swallow because of that. Seeing positive and/or realistic depictions of marginalized groups has helped humanize them in the eyes of people who may have previously seen them as inferior. So perhaps there is a sliver of truth to the purported “gay agenda”, if the agenda is to be accepted as human.

History influences the present.

It is true that African men, when conscripted into slavery, were tortured in the vilest ways. The “seasoning” process was a violent method of breaking the spirit of captives. It wasn’t enough torture to pack them into boats so tight that they often slept in their own filth and were chained people who didn’t survive the journey before landfall. It wasn’t enough that they were often packed in with people from completely different backgrounds and languages, as their captors thought their inability to communicate would deter mutinies on the open seas.

When they arrived in the “New World”, especially in the Caribbean islands, overseers would sometimes make “an example” of one or two of them. They would strip and maim one man while the others were forced to watch. Limbs would be chopped, eyes gouged, tongues cut out, and sometimes they would castrate them. Sometimes they would be sodomized with poles or irons. These torture sessions were warnings to the others that if they dared attempt freedom, any of those fates could befall them.

After widespread slavery was abolished in the United States, lynch mobs often found it necessary to castrate their victims, as the purported crime often had to do with assault or sexual deviance. Parts of the white mobs were children and women who would watch as if the murder of someone was some sort of light performance art. Even in modern times, assault of Black men by angry mobs involve some sort of humiliation. Just ask Abner Louima, who was falsely imprisoned by New York City police officers and sodomized with a broom. All these horrors happened and are true. None of these horrors made anyone gay or trans, though.

The truth is that queer people have existed since people existed.

This fact includes people in Africa. The social behavior that we see in queer people now was not frowned upon before as it sometimes is now, and their sex lives weren’t as scrutinized and legislated as today. Ugandan King Mwanga II was open about his sexual relationships with his male subjects. Men who assumed a gender not their own were known as “mukodo dako” and were viewed as women in their community. Nzinga of the Ndongo kingdom (Angola) demanded she be known as “King”, and she had a harem of men who dressed in traditional women’s garb.

In Congo, the Ganga-Ya-Chibanda was the high priest of the Giagues, a group that cross dressed regularly and referred to their priest as “grandmother”. Northern Congolese warriors of the Azande would make temporary “wives” of some men, so far as to pay brideprice to their families. In Southern Africa, the Chibadi carried themselves as women and were ashamed to be called “men”. In Kenya, Nigeria, Sudan, and Tanzania, woman-woman marriages were a regular occurrence, and in Bantu, Lesbianism was a main trait of chief diviners.

What we now call homosexuality and transsexuality have always been on the African continent. Europeans didn’t import it there. What they DID import was the homophobia veiled as “Christianity”, the same type of “Christianity” that led to harsh anti-gay laws across the continent today. Bear in mind that Europeans didn’t import Christianity to Africa, as it was already there in much of Eastern Africa. Europeans only brought their interpretation of Christianity. This helped them rationalize enslaving human beings, treating them worse than animals, and suppressing their indigenous traditions and ways of life with bloody force. This is not to say that European colonizers are solely to blame for the world’s pivot to homophobia.

Fear of what is different has always been an issue, and other religions have done their part to oppress queer folks. However, the homophobia in American communities and western and central Africa can be traced to the “teachings” of the empires who sought to colonize them.

Moving Forward

There is no clear “one way” to combat the homophobia that permeates parts our community now. One important thing that we can do is to stop acting like this is strictly a Black community issue. It is universal, but we seem to primarily focus on instances of toxic masculinity and violence when the assailants are Black. In fact, more white men commit acts of violence, but Black men are punished more. Black people ARE more likely the victims of these types of crimes, though.

Seeing gender and sexuality as more fluid than what we were rigidly taught in grade school would help, as our 4^th grade understanding of the world should evolve well past the 4^th grade. We expand our understanding of language and math and history as we get older. There is no reason we can’t do the same for science and sexuality. The LGBTQIA Pride movement is NOT in competition with any other human rights movement. Even Huey Newton was aware of this and pushed for supporting all liberation/equality movements. Most importantly, If we see someone expressing themselves and their sexuality in a way that is foreign to us, the respectable thing to do is to either acknowledge and respect them, as they are not hurting us at all by doing so, or we can mind our damn business. Happy Pride.

About Chris Thompson