Black and postgay

Ten years ago this month I came out of the closet. I was a second-year student at Harvard Law School when I fell in love with a man for the first time. I never told him about it, but the experience initiated a coming-out process that culminated two months later: I walked into a bookstore in Harvard Square and searched for a book to teach me about homosexuality. Nervously looking over my shoulder, I thumbed through the books in the gay and lesbian section until I found one I wanted to buy. I read the entire book that night, and the next day I called my mother in Texas.

"Mom, I have something to tell you," I stuttered. "I'm gay."

"I love you," my mom told me, "no matter what." But she also warned me to "be careful" and not to tell too many people.

Despite my mom's warning, I wanted people to know my sexual orientation so I wouldn't have to come out to everyone individually. Fortunately, I soon discovered the first rule of coming out: If you tell the right people, you don't have to tell everyone else. It worked. I became the "black gay guy" on campus almost overnight. One of my professors even asked if I had come out recently. "Well, yes, but how did you know?" I inquired.

"Another professor told me," he said. And to think I had believed that Harvard law professors had more important things to do with their time than to speculate about the sexual orientation of their students.

Although I came out on campus instantly, it took me a full year to come out to the rest of my family. Less than a year after I came out to them, I found myself in the strange position of being the only (perhaps the first) openly gay special assistant to the president of the United States.

I served Bill Clinton during a rocky two-year period that began with the "gays in the military" debacle and ended with the firing of Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders. My sexual orientation was rarely an issue for the White House staff and never an issue with the president. In fact, I volunteered to work on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues for the Administration as an unofficial liaison with national GLBT organizations.

By 1995, I had become a full-fledged "gay activist," a term I now despise. I left the White House, wrote my first book, and signed on as the first executive director of the National Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum. For the next three years my sexual orientation consumed my identity. Everyone from the grocery store clerk to the FedEx man seemed to know I was a gay public figure.

Since 1998, I have discovered a more comfortable and peaceful place in the "postgay" world. While I still write columns and give speeches about race and sexuality, I no longer consider myself an "activist," and I have carefully avoided accepting any leadership positions in gay organizations. I no longer feel compelled to stay informed about every "gay issue," and I rarely attend GLBT political or fund-raising events. I still support the GLBT struggle, but my sexual orientation identity is now more social than political.

I have also evolved racially in the past 10 years. I started out deeply ensconced in the (white) GLBT communities in Boston and San Francisco and then moved to Washington and became active in black GLBT causes. I have since limited my financial contributions solely to black GLBT organizations and causes. But I still feel more comfortable as an individual than as a member of any political group. My friends and I joke that we are "postgay" because we have found a space where our sexual orientation neither limits nor identifies us. But we also feel liberated from the whiteness of the GLBT movement and unthreatened by the self-perpetuating white images generated by the mainstream GLBT community. We have moved on from white gay America and found our own space.

Today, I teach college students about government, civil rights, and civil liberties. They live in a world where TV shows often feature GLBT characters and politicians freely discuss sexual orientation issues. That never would have happened 10 years ago. I like to think I had some small part in making that change. But my greatest contribution today is simply to live my life as who I am.