“And I could never forget the time when I marched with Mrs. King as an honorary grand marshal in the annual King Day Parade. But the most profound image in my mind was the sight of a small band of KKK leaders marching through the streets of downtown Atlanta in 1989 under the protection of black police officers who kept them separated from hundreds of counter demonstrators. That was the paradox of Atlanta. Surrounded by some of the most conservative places in the south, the Atlanta metropolitan area was an oasis of culture and diversity where you could forgive but you could never forget.” (148)
“I realized that was the disconnect in my message. I was providing facts and figures and information, but some of the people affected by the down low wanted emotion instead. I was explaining why blame was a counterproductive emotion that would not change reality, but that explanation missed the point for some listeners. Their reality was that they needed someone to blame. They had been lied to and cheated on, and they needed someone to be responsible. They needed a villain.” (150)
and that’s the most important thing this book achieves-it sets folks’ minds up to be changed, or at least be complicated a little bit between black and white (the binaries, not the Absolute Categories of Race that seem to govern the united$tatesofamerica). it’s also the reason i’m not down with pride (though i would like to see asses in chairs when we debut our one-night-only drag musical during pride this year-june 27th at buddies in badtimes theatre) in principle, because it’s all fine and good to prance during one socially-sanctioned week a year, but what about the everyday? to me, keith boykin is a hero every day, getting his audrelorde on. i was listening to a recent podcast of chicago’s 89.5 the barbershop show about trayvon, and there was a caller who was trying to draw attention to the institutional racism of the police, etc. and the hosts really weren’t having it. could that be because it’s more tangible to vilify that one cop versus imagining the entire prison industrial complex dismantled? well, someone go tell angela davis that’s impossible. i dare you.
out/games:
“A few of the guys would talk to me on the sly, while others-who had seen me talking about gay issues on television or in the newspaper-would walk a country mile to steer clear of me. In fact, I could almost identify who was in the closet based on how much effort they put into avoiding me.” (7)
“Meanwhile, by the 1980s, gay men had learned to morph themselves from a homosexual stereotype into a heterosexual one. A community that was being destroyed by a deadly new disease now exalted men who fit into a stereotypical image of masculine fitness and health. An extensive gym culture developed, and a new gay icon emerged. The new gay model was not just the guy next door. He was a better version of the guy next door. And that was one of the secrets that had been exposed by the unraveling of the matrix. While the matrix told us that gay men looked a certain way, gay men themselves knew that the matrix was wrong. They could see it in their social circles, and they could see it in the mirror. What’s more shocking, however, is that some of the antigay conservatives knew the same thing. While they continued to profit from their perpetuation of a gay stereotype, some of them knew all along that the stereotype was wrong. They knew because they helped to design the system. As lawmakers, ministers, corporate executives, and beneficiaries of the status quo, they were the architects of the matrix.
Ironically, the architects of the matrix maintained the system with the complicity of the very people it oppressed. By creating a utopian version of heterosexuality, the architects produced a social norm that helped to push gay men into false and unnatural relationships with women. The men in these sham relationships knew better than anyone that the matrix was a fraud, but they could never reveal the fraud without revealing their homosexuality. Their ability to operate without suspicion in society depended on their silence. So they persisted in the lie that gay men were simply stereotypes, and as long as they avoided the stereotypes they also avoided detection. That is, until the AIDS epidemic.” (34-5)
“Among today’s major figures in the industry, Meshell Ndegeocello stands alone as an openly bisexual black recording artist, and much of her music explores the complexity of sexual identity. When Ndegeocello remade Bill Withers’s classic ‘Who Is He (And What Is He to You),’ she complicated the formula of the song without changing a word. When Withers had asked the question in the title of the song, it seemed clear he was asking his woman about a man they had just passed on the street. But when Ndegeocello sang the exact same verse, it automatically introduced a homosexual relationship into the picture. If she was asking the question to her man in the traditional heterosexual equation, then the man must have been involved with the other man who was walking down the street. In order to make that illicit relationship into a heterosexual affair, Ndegeocello’s partner would have to be a woman, meaning that Ndegeocello was in a homosexual relationship. Either way, whether it’s two men or two women, somebody was sleeping with someone else of the same gender.” (59)
index fingers ablaze:
“Blame is usually reactive, not proactive. To blame someone for infecting us with HIV means we are already infected. All we can do is react. On the other hand, to stop someone from infecting us with HIV requires us to be proactive, not reactive. The most important lesson that all people need to learn about AIDS is that the disease is entirely preventable. It is our behavior, not our identity, that creates the conditions for the spread of HIV. But the DL phenomenon may discourage women from exercising personal autonomy. To the extent to which we can point our fingers at someone else, we implicitly excuse ourselves from responsibility.” (158-9)
“Older black gay men sometimes do not understand the younger hip hoppers who adopt the new culture, and yet the embrace of hip hop among black gay youth seems strikingly similar to the embrace of black church culture among many older black gay men who socialize in gay settings on Saturdays and then attend homophobic churches on Sundays. In different times, we find different ways to identify with our communities.” (235)
“When black men become involved in fake relationships, we process the issue by ascribing negative characteristics to an entire group of people, and we tend to think in global terms concerning the breakdown of the black family and other such nonsense. When white men become involved in fake relationships, we simply call it what it is and move on. We don’t make sweeping generalizations about all white men, and we don’t try to study the pathology of their behavior.” (72)
“If men on the down low were secretly sleeping with other men and then bringing HIV back to their female partners, that could explain the infection rates among black women. But there was not much evidence to support the theory, and I was concerned that focusing attention on the issue would divert our energy from the factors we already knew were responsible for the problem, including unprotected heterosexual intercourse and intravenous drug use with infected needles.” (83)
“After all, the woman is often seen as a victim, whether it’s from domestic abuse, infidelity, or even from previously latent effects of child abuse. It may be true that all criminals can be seen as victims of their environment, but men are rarely afforded the same presumption of victimhood that is sometimes conferred upon women. There is no need to explore the male inner psyche when we have already concluded that ‘men are dogs’.” (51-2)
“you’re saying that our daddy was on the down low?”
“way down low.”