Now, let’s be clear: Nazis are a bad thing, race is not. Nevermind LGBT people and musicals. That’s just stereotyping.
But no matter how you look at it, race’s role in the lives of LGBT people is not one easily or lightly explained. (Or briefly; this is easily my longest “Unbroken Raina Thought” ever.) Particularly because in doing so you risk putting one more label on someone. A label that holds baggage for those on the outside, if not the person themselves.
That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be talked about. To understand how people come to be where they are now, you need to understand where they’ve been. Race and LGBT status are undeniably part of that.
I think of my own life, when I wanted to be a performer in “The Little Mermaid on Ice.” (Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s a musical.) The reality is that I was, A) Not a skater, and B) An office manager backstage. Not exactly ice show norms.
Were these what defined me? No, but they were two things I had to overcome. Both personally and in terms of people’s perceptions of what I could do, if I was going live my life the way I wanted.
This is the condition in which many LGBT people, particularly youth, find themselves.
To start with, LGBT youth of color are NOT that different from their white peers in terms of their LGBT identity. The formation and acceptance of sexual identity occurs about the same time in all youth, regardless of race or gender.(2)
Further, they should not be considered a minority’s minority inside the LGBT community. As I noted last week, “overall, a third of those identifying as LGBT are nonwhite,” according to a one national study.(3) Meaning that minority percentages within our community are the same as the American population as a whole.
What is different, however, according to an Advocates for Youth study, is “they must bear the twin burdens of racism and homophobia.”(2) They are now two minorities in the world, instead of just one.
One of those minority communities is Asians. According to that same study, 4.3 percent of Asians consider themselves LGBT.(3) Like many LGBT people, they often feel persecuted within the LGBT community.
I have to admit this strikes me as strange. It’s always seemed to me that as a minority community, members of that minority would be more sensitive to the needs of other minorities. Sadly, that is not the case.
In the 1960s, for instance, civil rights activists often had no problem discriminating against women.(4) A minority-on-minority trend that sometimes continues today in the LGBT community, according to Joseph Erbentraut from EDGE Boston.
“LGBT communities, despite having long histories of themselves facing (and fighting) discrimination, isolation and inequality, are far from immune to the racism that permeates modern society.”(5)
As an example, he cites Asians within the LGBT community. People, he says, who face incidents that seem more like the Deep South of the ‘60s than modern day America: "No Asians" disclaimers are found on many profiles on gay dating and hookup sites, while particular social clubs are known for having "too many Asians."(5)
Some incidents seem more like junior high school, where the stereotype holds Asians have small penises. Especially in contrast to white and African-American men.(5)
Erbentraut -- which is a really awesome name I plan to use in a book someday -- attributes some of this to LGBT social life, “which seems to place higher value on more ‘macho’ depictions of gay life: Club posters and web ad campaigns are centered on bulky white bodies with chiseled abs,” he writes.(5)
He goes on to note, however, “Gay club promoters or magazines were not the first to invent or popularize such images.”(5)
Looking further back, he cites Patrick Cheng an assistant professor at Cambridge. No, his name is not as cool, but his theory is:
"I think all this stems from something larger than the queer issue, but rather this ’Orientalist’ notion of East vs. West," Cheng said. "In order for the West to assert its masculinity, it needs something to be feminized, and this ends up emasculating Asian men. We’re already seen as less masculine in movies where we’re either nerds or Zen masters, but never just the guy next door -- or a stud."(5)
Is this the life of all Asian people within the LGBT community? Certainly not; I’ve known a number of Asian LGBT people that have never faced these issues. But they do know it’s out there, even if they’ve thankfully never had to deal with it themselves.
Less familiar to me is the lives of LGBT people within the Native American community. Ironic, as I live in a community with a large Native American population, most from a tribe centered on a reservation just a few miles away.
Obviously -- and this is no defense -- I’m not the only one. In the Gallup poll examining LGBT communities by race, they didn’t even ask about Native Americans. Indeed, digging through every webpage I could yielded no demographics whatsoever.
One thing I did find, however: the high proportion of same-sex couples in counties dominated by Native Americans across the greater Northwest and other parts of America.(6) Indeed, the article, “Same-Sex Couples and Native American Communities” seems to state the obvious: “The prevalence of same-sex partnerships in Native American communities over a broad swath of the United States has been little noted in the media” -- along with just about every other aspect of Native American LGBT life.(6)
One thing it did note, however, was the honored place many Native American nations hold for for transsexuals—or “two-spirit people”— “whose ambiguous gender position has been associated with spiritual power.”(6)
Calling them a “fundamental institution” among Native Americans, Wikipedia notes they’ve been documented in more than 130 North American tribes.(7) Their roles in the community often included: healers or medicine persons, conveyors of oral traditions and songs, matchmakers, and foretellers of the future, just to name a few.(7)
Today, many Native American leaders are active in the freedom to marry movement, considering it key to committed LGBT/Two-spirit couples(8). And more than just supporting it, they’ve done it. Native American tribes are federally recognized sovereign nations—thus they can do whatever they want when it comes to marriage for same-sex couples.(8) Across the United States, from Michigan to Washington to Oklahoma, they have done so.
Does this mean there’s no discrimination against LGBT people inside the Native American community? Of course not.
In Tim Giago’s Huffington Post blog, he writes that LBGT people within the Native American community draw “mixed emotions. There are those who accept it as a genuine occurrence among the Indian people, and there are those who deny it.”(9)
Not exactly the opening lines of a Broadway musical, but it’s a start, I guess.
Obviously, this column just touches the surface of LGBT life within the Asian and Native American minority communities. (More about that next time.) And as I noted before, no one survey of many can define the experience of an individual. People can and do live lives that are in complete contrast to the majority experience.
Like me: I became a performer for Disney On Ice, despite the odds. Sure, it was someone else’s musical, but it was a personal victory and I loved it. I have no doubt other people do, too.
References:
1) OK, there are “Cabaret” and, if you really want to stretch it, “The Producers.” In defense of my original statement, however, I did have to look those up.
2) The Impact of Homophobia and Racism on GLBTQ Youth of Color
http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/storage/advfy/documents/fsglbtq_yoc.pdf
2a) Two notes about this study:
* For anyone interested in really understanding the world of LGBT youth of color, this is an incredible read. I highly recommend giving it more time than I can here.
* It pegs the age of awareness of sexual identity at about 16, older than some other studies I’ve cited. I attribute this to the date of the study: 2007. As I’ve mentioned before, a lot has changed in just a half-decade.
3) Gallup study: 3.4 percent of US adults are LGBT
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=893&sid=3083798
4) Feminism and the Civil Rights Movement (1965), Casey Hayden and Mary King
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/archive/resources/documents/ch34_02.htm
Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee once said: the "only position for women in SNCC is prone." And this is just one example.
5) The Last Bias: How & Why We Tolerate Gay Anti-Asian Prejudice -- & Its Pernicious Effect on Our Community
http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=news&sc=&sc2=features&sc3=&id=109413
6) Same-Sex Couples and Native American Communities
http://www.geocurrents.info/cultural-geography/same-sex-couples-and-native-american-communities
7) Wikipedia: Two-spirit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-Spirit
8) Why Marriage Matters to Native Americans
http://www.freedomtomarry.org/communities/entry/c/native-americans
9) Native Americans and Homosexuality
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-giago/native-americans-and-homosexuality_b_2267967.html