The Nature of Racism in the Gay Community and Its Impact on Gay Men of Color

Background and Purposes: Despite this wide-spread recognition that gay men of color experience high levels of racism in the gay community, few scholars have attempted to explore the nature of racism experienced by gay men of color. Instead, most studies on the experiences of gay men of color use racism as a taken-for-granted social fact and focuses on the effects of racism rather than on racism itself. The problem with this approach is that racism is often treated as a given, with little attempt to expand on what it is or how it exerts an influence. Because of this tendency, little is known about how gay men of color experience racism, leading to difficulty in designing effective intervention strategies to help address the impact of racism on gay men of color or to address racism in the gay community. In this paper, we attempt to examine how racism manifests itself in the gay community in order to better inform how racism in the gay community should be addressed at the macro level and how interventions to deal with racism should be designed at the micro level.

Methods: To explore who racism manifests itself and how gay men of color specifically experience racism, we analyze comments made by gay men on various online websites that cater to a gay audience using tents of Critical Race Theory and Systemic Racism Theory. Given this approach, we find data in the “real world,” rather than attempt to construct a pre-determined universe of potential data sources. Data were then analyzed using narrative analysis, a way of examining the entire story rather than focusing on themes or codes.  

Findings: We find that racism in the gay community manifests itself in three ways. First, gay men of color are often excluded from mainstream gay organizations and invisible in gay publications. In addition, gay men of color experience sexual rejection from gay white men specifically because of their race. Although gay white men argue that it is sexual preference, rather than rejection, we find that it is not sexual rejection per se but the racist comments that accompany the rationale for sexual rejection that impacts gay men of color. Finally, we find that gay men of color are often objectified by gay white men.

Conclusion: Although our findings cannot be generalizeable, they nonetheless have implications for practice both on a macro and micro level. On a macro-level, there is an urgent need to enact policies that ensure gay men of color’s participation in gay-identified organizations and promote more inclusive representation in the gay media. On the micro-level, intervention strategies should target gay white men in order to address issues of racial sensitivity while simultaneously targeting gay men of color in order to address issues of self-efficacy in participating in gay organizations, establishing groups for gay men of color, and increasing self-esteem within a community that marginalizes racial minorities.