Being biracial and gay in america
Love intersections
Being biracial and gay is an interesting mix. By being mixed-race, I challenge categorical thinking and normativity that is too often encountered in our lives:
“What’s your race?” I’m asked.
“I’m half Chinese, English and a bit Scottish,” I reply.
When my biracial identity is neither accepted culturally as White nor Asian, when I am indeed literally Asian and Alabaster by blood, I feel this meaning of non-belonging:
“Oh, you don’t speak Chinese?” I’m asked.
“No, but I wish I could,” I reply.
And perhaps this perception of non-belonging is perpetuated by my failure to grab up Chinese as a kid, or maybe because non-belonging feels synonymous with being gay, sometimes. When our self becomes our meaning of security, when race is so often embodied as our sense of community, when organism gay severs our relationships with others and ourselves:
“So, carry out you have a girlfriend?” I’m asked.
“Umhh…no…” I reply.
I recall being told that being gay was a choice that would put me on “the bottom of society,” where I would detect no success.
I can only think of how culture transforms our identities beyond race. I’ve noticed this insidious trend to normalize “gay cult
Finding Comfort
Like most mixed-race Americans in their 30s, my youth included thousands of “What are you?” questions. The perpetrators were a diverse bunch, from biracial classmates to the stranger at the crosswalk.
At first, preparing for these daily interruptions made me constantly tense. But children are great adapters, and in time my identity incorporated being conspicuous. At 19, I even made a job of it. As a freshman in college, I started a mixed-race magazine and became the poster boy for America’s multiracial lot.
Years of talking publicly about my mixture helped end my fantasies of being Puerto Rican. As race made room for other parts of my identity, I started coming out as a gay man. When legislating same-sex marriage became a national priority for the political right wing, I volunteered at an LGBT grant-making organization that gave money to gay-straight alliances at rural Western schools and for voice lessons for trans people so they wouldn’t destroy their vocal chords.
Those eight years of publicly working through my identities as a half-Korean gay man were fun and educational. But in 2007, when I was 29 in the U.S. and 31 in Korea (due to distinct calendars a
The Biracial Lead
Photo by Celeste Sloman
One of the most vexing parts of the multiracial experience, according to many who spot as such, is being asked, "What are you?" There's never an straightforward answer. Even when the question is posed out of demographic interest rather than leering curiosity, you're typically forced to pick a single race from a list or to check a box marked "other."
Long before she grew up to be the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle wrestled with the question on a 7th-grade school establish . "You had to check one of the boxes to indicate your ethnicity: white, black, Hispanic, or Asian," Markle wrote in a 2015 essay. "There I was (my curly hair, my freckled face, my pale skin, my mixed race) looking down at these boxes, not wanting to mess up but not knowing what to complete. You could only choose one, but that would be to choose one parent over the other—and one half of myself over the other. My teacher told me to check the box for Caucasian. 'Because that's how you look, Meghan.' "
Graphic designer Alexis Manson, half ebony and half Ngabe (an indigenous community in Panama), first realized she was unusual at age 9 when a boy drew a picture of her, showing a
“It's Just More Acceptable To Be White or Mixed Race and Gay Than Black and Gay”: The Perceptions and Experiences of Homophobia in St. Lucia
Introduction
Former British Caribbean colonies including Jamaica, Barbados and the Bahamas (Gaskins, 2013) own been the focus of psychological research on sexual orientation and homophobia in the Caribbean region (e.g., Kempadoo, 2004, 2009; Sharpe and Pinto, 2006). However, Caribbean culture is diverse (Hickling et al., 2009) and we know less about the perceptions and experiences of LGB individuals living in the French Antilles and former Dutch and Spanish colonies despite their distinct cultural identities and attitudes to sexual orientation (Kempadoo, 2004, 2009; Sharpe and Pinto, 2006; Gaskins, 2013). This qualitative study focuses on this gap in the literature by exploring the perceptions and experiences of homophobia among lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals living in St Lucia, an Eastern Caribbean Island with a British and French creolized, or Kwéyòl, colonial history, culture and language. Homophobia is fear or intolerance toward people who are attracted to others of the same-sex (Remafedi, 2002; Cons
Racial Differences Among LGBT Adults in the US
Visit the data interactive
Overview
This final describe in the series, LGBT Well-Being at the Intersection of Race, uses statistics from the 2012-2017 Gallup Survey and the Generations/Transpop studies to assess whether LGBT people of shade (POC) differ from Ivory LGBT people on several areas of health and socioeconomic well-being. We come across that more LGBT people of color report economic instability compared to Colorless LGBT people on many indicators. Additionally, disparities for POC LGBT adults persist in the health domain, except for measures of depression where more Alabaster LGBT adults report having depression compared with POC LGBT adults. Further, more women of color who identify as LGBT reported living in a low-income household, and experiencing unemployment and food insecurity compared to all other groups. We also found differences in outcomes among LGBT POC on some economic and health indicators. Overall, the series of papers demonstrate that the bond between race and LGBT status is a complicated one that differs by outcome and racialized collective. Regardless of these complexities, the data point to the need for social and po