Queer As White Folk

By Keith Boykin, in sexuality
Friday, March 1 2002, 11:23AM

Originally posted on Gay.com

Later this month, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force will release a first-of-its-kind survey of 2,500 black lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people. The potentially groundbreaking survey, conducted by five African-American LGBT researchers, was administered over a five-month period in the spring and summer of 2000 and asked participants to describe their sexual orientation.

It will come as no surprise if very few respondents identified as "queer." Despite the claim that "queer" is more inclusive than "gay" and simpler than "LGBT," the word "queer" is just as white as the television show that bears its name. It does not represent the vast majority of black homosexuals and bisexuals.

After 10 years of involvement in the LGBT community, I've met tens of thousands of black LGBT people, and only a handful of them identified as queer. Almost all who did were activists and academics, usually in mostly white settings.

In recent years, I've noticed the growth of "Queers of Color" organizations on a few college campuses, but I've seen no such outbreak on black college campuses. Sterling Washington, president of the Bisexual Lesbian and Gay Organization of Students at Howard (BLAGOSAH), explained that nearly all of the 40 members of his organization identify as "gay" or "same-gender-loving." At his historically black college, he said, "I don't know anyone who says I'm queer."

Personally, I don't care if black people want to call themselves queer. Nor am I troubled by people who identify as "gay" or with the increasingly popular and less Eurocentric term "same-gender-loving." I don't like any of these terms, but I learned long ago that no single term can adequately represent the diversity of our communities.

Is queer universal?

What troubles me is not the use of the word "queer," but rather the insistence by some queers that "queer" is an all-encompassing term that represents everyone and transcends race and sexual orientation. Since they've never bothered to ask everyone, it's quite a stretch to assert this claim of universal identity.

Some queers may see themselves as harbingers of change, but if change is imposed from the top down, it belies the notion of grassroots empowerment at the core of the progressive movement. It also distances the queer progressives from the apparently unenlightened masses for whom they purport to speak.

Because of the negative history associated with the word "queer," my guess is that most LGBT people, regardless of their race, dislike the term. In the black LGBT community, the percentages who avoid it seem even higher. In fact, in the black LGBT community, the word "queer" can isolate black leaders from the communities they represent.

Veteran activist George Bellinger Jr. of the Harlem Directors Group explained that "queer has a connotation of strange, and I know there are a lot of gay people who have a lot of issues going on with them, but it doesn't necessarily have to be strange."

Mandy Carter, another veteran activist, simply identifies as "lesbian" because the word "gay" has always implied men, but she is not afraid to use the term "queer." She compared it to the reappropriation of the word "black" among African Americans, but she acknowledged that "the word 'queer' hasn't had quite the success."

According to GayHistory.com, the word "queer" is "less awkward" than LGBT and "equally inclusive" but it "has not caught on largely because many older gays and lesbians are still too stung by its historical use as a term of denigration." But older folks aren't the only ones objecting. In the black community, the opposition seems more about race, class and politics than age.

Changing bad into good

So why embrace a term with such a negative connotation? Some have explained that the closely related idea of "queer theory" is designed to "destabilize" cultural ideas of normality and sexuality. Queer identity might help do the same. Others have described the process of renaming one's identity as "inversion" and compared it to the newly popular use of the word "nigger" as a positive term among some in the black community.

Hunter College Professor Juan Battle challenges the assumptions behind the inversion theory because, he says, the term "queer" was used to oppress non-LGBT groups and because straight people also describe themselves as "queer" as a political identity. "Even if LGBT (white) people 'took' the word queer, they should be careful," Battle warns. "It looks like some straight (white) people might want the word back."

However they choose to describe themselves, progressive activists should think twice before promoting the term "queer" as inclusive language, especially to blacks. If queers really do care about healing the wounds that divide us by race, "queering" black America is not the place to start.