My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History

12. How Gay Stays White and What Kind of White It Stays

How Gay Stays White and What Kind of White It Stays Bérubé intended this talk as a critical commentary on the state of gay male politics and community life. Reflecting upon experiences that were overtly political (his work with the Campaign for Military Service in 1993) as well as personal (his gay men’s hiv-negative support group), he investigates how race gets constructed, seemingly without intentionality but with profound consequences. The whiteness of “gay male” as a social category has significant implications for how the agenda of a movement gets set, what kind of successes and limitations a movement has, and who reaps the benefits from a politics of sexual identity. The Stereotype When I teach college courses on queer history or queer working-class studies , I encourage students to explore the many ways that homosexuality is shaped by race, class, and gender. I know that racialized phantom figures hover over our classroom and inhabit our consciousness. I try to name these figures out loud to bring them down to earth so we can begin to resist their stranglehold on our intelligence. One by one, I recite the social categories that students have already used in our discussions—immigrant, worker, corporate executive, welfare recipient, student on financial aid, lesbian mother—and ask students first to imagine the stereotypical figure associated with the category and then to call out the figure’s race, gender, class, and sexuality. As we watch each other conjure up and name these phantoms , we are stunned at how well each of us has learned by heart the same fearful chorus. Whenever I get to the social category “gay man,” the students’ response is always the same: “white and well-to-do.” In the United States today, the Originally published in The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, edited by Birgit Rasmussen, Eric Klineberg, Irene Nexica, and Matt Wray, 234–65 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 12 chapter • • • • • • • • • • • • how gay stays white : 203 dominant image of the typical gay man is a white man who is financially better off than most everyone else. My White Desires Since the day I came out to my best friend in 1968, I have inhabited the social category “gay white man.” As a historian, writer, and activist, I’ve examined the gay and the male parts of that identity, and more recently I’ve explored my working-class background and the Franco-American ethnicity that is so intertwined with it. But only recently have I identified with or seriously examined my gay male whiteness.1 Several years ago I made the decision to put race and class at the center of my gay writing and activism. I was frustrated at how my own gay social and activist circles reproduced larger patterns of racial separation by remaining almost entirely white. And I felt abandoned as the vision of the national gay movement and media narrowed from fighting for liberation, freedom, and social justice to expressing personal pride, achieving visibility, and lobbying for individual equality within existing institutions. What emerged was too often an exclusively gay rights agenda isolated from supposedly nongay issues , such as homelessness, unemployment, welfare, universal health care, union organizing, affirmative action, and abortion rights. To gain recogniSergeant First Class Perry Watkins speaking at the funeral of Leonard Matlovich, 1988. Photograph © 2010 jeb (Joan E. Biren). 204 : a working-class intellectual tion and credibility, some gay organizations and media began to aggressively promote the so-called positive image of a generic gay community that is an upscale, mostly male, and mostly white consumer market with mainstream , even traditional, values. Such a strategy derives its power from an unexamined investment in whiteness and middle-class identification. As a result, its practitioners seemed not to take seriously or even notice how their gay visibility successes at times exploited and reinforced a racialized class divide that continues to tear our nation apart, including our lesbian and gay communities. My decision to put race and class at the center of my gay work led me as a historian to pursue the history of a multiracial maritime union that in the 1930s and 1940s fought for racial equality and the dignity of openly gay workers.2 And my decision opened doors that enabled me as an activist to join multiracial lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender groups whose members have been doing antiracist work for a long time and in which gay white...