Reflections of a SNAP! Queen Marlon T. Riggs NEGRO FAGGOTRY IS in fashion. SNAP! Turn on your television and camp queens greet you in living color. SNAP! Turn to cable and watch America’s most bankable modern min­strel expound on getting "fucked in the ass" or his fear of faggots. SNAP! Turn off the TV, turn […]

Earl Ofari Hutchinson HAVE BLACK ATTITUDES toward gays undergone much change today? Hardly. Rappers such as Ice Cube still rap that "Real niggers ain’t faggots." Leading Afrocentrists have sworn that "homosexuality is a deviation from Afrocentricity." Bushels of Black ministers, with generous support from their white Christian fundamentalist breth­ren, still brand homosexuality "a sin before […]

Gay rights proponents sought to legitimize a sexual identity antidis­crimination norm by analogizing to historical race discrimination: the military’s discriminatory practices against gays and lesbians is the same as, or at the very least similar to, the military’s discriminatory practices against Blacks. Thus, the argument runs, because it is illegal and immoral for the military […]

The notion that Blacks are not like gays takes several rhetorical forms in Black anti-racist discourse. Perhaps the most problematic is idea that in a biological, cultural, and "natural" sense, homosexuality is fundamentally unBlack.1 Blacks are not like gays, in other words, be­cause gays are white. Frantz Fanon, for example, claimed that "there is no […]

The Deployment of Race/Sexual Orientation Analogies in the Debates about the "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Policy Devon W. Carbado IN THE CONTEXT of the "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" controversy, gay rights proponents argued that the military’s historical discriminatory policies against Blacks is like the military’s current discriminatory policy against gays and lesbians; that the rhetoric […]

Charles I. Nero HISTORICALLY, RELIGION HAS served as a liberating force in the African American community. According to Albert Raboteau, Black slaves as early as 1774 publicly and politically declared that Chris­tianity and the institution of slavery were incompatible. "In that year," Raboteau notes, "the governor of Massachusetts received ‘The Petition of a Grate [sic] […]

Racial Essentialism, Sexuality, and the Problem of Authority Dwight A. McBride The gay people we knew then did not live in separate subcultures, not in the small, segregated black community where work was diffi­cult to find, where many of us were poor. . . . Sheer economic neces­sity and fierce white racism, as well as […]

Part III focuses specifically on the question of race and sexual orienta­tion—that is, the extent to which antiracist discourse excludes or nominally includes the experiences of Black lesbians and gays. Dwight McBride argues that certain antiracist proponents essential — ize Blackness in order to legitimize and authenticate their (straight male) voice as representative of "the […]

The Black Man/Black Woman Debate in Context Derrick Bell RAYFORD LOGAN, the great black historian, called the period at the turn of the last century the nadir for black people. Hundreds of blacks were lynched, thousands were victims of racist violence and intimi­dation, and literally millions were exploited on farms and at mostly menial labor […]

In the final act of this play, "evil" is brought to "justice." The place­ment of this act at the end is critical because it gives meaning to the two previous stories. The imagery is stark. Mike Tyson is the brute valued by the master only for the strength of his back and arms. He is […]