The Sexuality of Betrayal

Carla Trujillo’s piece on Chicana lesbian identity explicitly recovers, from the work of Cherríe Moraga, the notion of Chicana lesbian sexuality as racial and cultural betrayal. More largely construed, the meeting of LGBT sexuality and racial identity is one fraught with tension. On one hand, the purported refusal of compulsory procreativity (what Adrienne Rich once famously called Compulsory Heterosexuality) on the part of lesbians and gay men of color is an important part of the puzzle. In a white supremacist society, sustaining the community of color through reproduction is an important, if underthought, part of resistance to racial domination. But perhaps more crucial to the tensions around race and sexuality is the notion of cultural otherness, the association of LGBT sexuality with whiteness and assimilation. The struggle for gay men and lesbians of color has been to determine their own answers to this preconception, their own solutions to the conundrum of the powerful pull of sexuality with the equally powerful fact of racial identity in a white supremacist society.

A personal recollection— When I came out to my family, there was, to a limited extent, the revulsion most heterosexual parents express at the revelation of gayness or lesbian identity. But more importantly for my family was the double betrayal of gender and racial identity. They associated my gayness with Anglo (white American) identity, with being corrupted by Anglo culture and decadent mores far from home (in college). Simultaneously, my gayness was read by my family as a rejection of appropriate masculinity, patriarchy, and maleness: I would not have a family, a wife, and could not, by definition, meet the ideal of a Mexican American man. In the end, I remained unsure of which was more crucial in the dramatic events that followed. Suffice it to say, the gayness, the very fact of a sexual interest in men, seemed the least of it. This, curiously, was an experience echoed by other Chicanos/as at Yale, the awkward return home and the notion we had become "Anglo."

This narrative is one shared by many gay men and lesbians of color, in terms of negotiating the complicated spaces of race, gender, and sexuality. As C. pointed out in class, this nexus is what marks sexual identity difference for people of color, the confrontation with certain questions of allegiance and solidarity, with strong emotional and sentimental ties to the struggles of family and community, set against a backdrop of reactionary thinking about the appropriate solutions to living in a white supremacist society.

And some of these reactionary thinking models are relatively limited, as Trujillo points out. The challenge of gays and lesbians to heterodominant models of resistance for communities of color is just one aspect of the power of the reactionary model, which in some ways totters between revolutionary and reformist solutions (just as in the larger LGBT community). For the bourgeois assimilationists (Booker T. Washington comes, unsurprisingly, to mind), family and work form the bedrock of the solution for combating white supremacy. Through propriety, appropriate behavior, and hard work, communities of color can rise above the limitations of white supremacy. Within this model, lesbians and gay men of color can only be parasites (due to their non-procreative and individualist stance).

Yet, curiously, the revolutionary forces in racial-ethnic communities, those with an admittedly anti-assimilationist stance, also reject LGBT sexuality, associating it with bourgeois decadence. How much of this is borrowed from leftist thinking is unclear, although the association is there. The revolutionary social movements of the sixties in racial-ethnic communities of color, Black Power and El Movimiento Chicano et al., foregrounded a radical vision of family centered around a strong masculinity. To ironically echo the lesbian-feminists of the 1970s, you can’t fight the revolution in high heels, and the gender dimensions of LGBT sexuality made lesbians and gay men beyond the pale in terms of the righteous struggle against white supremacy (and relegated heterosexual women of color to the status of sexual tool and secretary).

In our current moment, which reflects this heritage of both assimilative and revolutionary struggles and idea(l)s around racial-ethnic identity for the historic “minority” groups in the United States (Black Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, Chinese-, Japanese-, and Filipino-American communities of historic standing, generally pre-1900), there is still a strong association of LGBT sexuality with whiteness, with "wrong" cultural assimilation, with decadence and corruption. In so far as LGBT sexuality is associated, correctly in mind, with challenging cultural norms and preconceptions around gender in communities of color, this association is a transference, a projection, an easy dismissal that sounds good and feels good for heterosexuals of color, that allows them to avoid confronting deeper questions. Given the embattled state many communities of color feel they are under, in particular Black and Latino communities, the defense posture reflects in some ways the tribulations of white supremacy.

But less generously, these attitudes also demonstrate a fundamental laziness, an analytic posture that seeks to preserve or maintain problematic gender and cultural norms that arguably result in a lot of unhappiness in communities of color, and not just for LGBT folks of color, but for families and women of color in particular, not to mention the corrosive effects of rigid masculinities on men of color of all sexualities. The persistence of both ideas of white sexuality and the efforts of LGBT people of color to integrate their experiences into the larger diorama of racial identity and community reflects, at the very least, the remarkable differences between sexuality across the racial spectrum.