A survey of 388 gays of various races shows that white and Latino queers have more mental issues than their more melanin-inclined counterparts:
According to a study conducted at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health among lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations, blacks and Latinos do not have more mental disorders than whites.
Based on the theory that stress related to prejudice would increase risk for mental disorders, researchers typically expect that black lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals face prejudice related to both racism and homophobia and therefore would have more disorders than their white counterparts.
Contrary to this expectation, however, the Mailman School study found that black lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals had significantly fewer disorders than white individuals. Latinos had a prevalence of disorders similar to whites.
The study, which will be published in next month’s American Journal of Public Health, also indicates that black and Latino gays have a higher prevalence of suicide attempts, but those attempts occurred during their youth, rather than during adulthood.
eagledancer4444
My sex research was on Inter-racial Same-Sex Couples. One of the interesting things to come up was although White gay men and lesbians tended to perceive their sexual orientation as a type of ethnicity, in and of itself, the vast majority of gays and lesbians of color saw their ethnicity as their primary identity, and their sexual orientation as a secondary or even tertiary identity. I recall one African-American man saying in his interview, “I’ve always been Black, but I didn’t need to deal with being gay until a lot later on in my life.†Being visibly different, such as being a person of color, means you have to learn coping skills for surviving in a racist society very early on. And more importantly—if you’re a kid of color growing up in a family of color, you have these coping skills modeled for you by your family and ethnic community. If you’re a White kid who will grow up to be a gay or lesbian adult, you historically had very few useful role models from your family of how to successfully survive in a homophobic society.
Uanda
Interesting views. Would it be fair to assume that being coloured (or not the appropriate colour in a particular country) in White Supremacist America would be the first hurdle, and gay arrives second with puberty? Ever tried being non-Japanese in Japan, non-Chinese in China, non-Arab in Arabia – racism is not limited to Nazis. A quote from Quentin Crisp: all jews are born from jewish parents, all coloured from coloured parents, gays are born as orphans. So why shouldn’t gays identify themselves as an ethnicity or race with its own culture? Perhaps you think gay is just a lifestyle, a choice, something to do when you retire? The reason we don’t have historical role models or family role models is because all of our role models have been (and continue to be) altered by homophobia historians and media. Alexander The Great, Da Vinci, none sacred – all covered up. So where do our parents go for inspiration and understanding of our plight? Most times they throw us out of the house and family as well. Good luck with your research.
eagledancer4444
In my teaching, I have always placed “gayness” in the same category as ethnicity. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me.
I’m in no way denying the importance of a gay or lesbian identity for an individual, regardless of their ethnicity. I have only used the word “lifestyle” in lectures or articles to mark it as a “code” word used by homophobes. Your point of being, for example, a non-Japanese in a Japanese society is precisely my point. Looking back over my original post in response to the mental health study, I was suggesting people of color have an advantage of growing up with coping skills of surviving racism that can be transferred to surviving homophobia. As your excellent quote from Mr. Crisp underscores, gay kids aren’t given this advantage. (And in balance, I should mention not all the coping/survival skills passed on in families of color in addressing racism are the best or most useful. There are some very dysfunctional survival skills in coping with racism, as there are very dysfunctional survival skills in coping with homophobia.)
An old friend of mine, Harry Hay, didn’t like the word “gay.” He liked the term “Changeling.” This is from european fairytale traditions of the Fairy Folk who steal a human child and leave a Fairy Changeling child in its place. Because of their magic, the child looks exactly like the replaced child–like a “real” member of the biological family. You can only tell the difference as the Changeling grows up, and the personality doesn’t match. To Harry, this sums up the experience of a GBLTQ kid born into a “straight” family.
The straight family, no matter how much love and support it can give can never model what it means to be a happy healthy GBLTQ adult, just as a Deaf child born into a hearing family won’t find a role model to be a happy healthy Deaf adult, or a transracially adopted child of color will find a role model of a happy healthy Adult person of color in a loving Caucasian family. It isn’t about love…it’s about discovering a viable “script” of behavior and appropriate coping skills.
Many Euro-American gay men have written or talked about discovering the gay community was like finding their “tribe.” It’s an excellent metaphor.
In sex research, most adult gay men will know they are “different” at an early age, often by the age of 7, and before they really have a vocabulary and a concept of what “gay” means. There’s a structural difference of say, a Asian-American child growing up with his biological family, where he knows he’s different from the Dominant Culture, but he still gets a “script” of how to be who he is–he gets the answer of “why/how” he is different.
Just so, there is a structural similarity of a child of color adopted into a Euro-American family, where the kid knows he’s different from the adoptive parents and extended family. Part of the mental health of the child needs to depend on role models from outside of the family that will match the kid’s reality. This is what happens with kids who are GBLTQ, but they often have to do the search for similar souls themselves rather than having their straight family do it for them, and may start at an older age, when they get to a point of greater idependance and mobility.
One of the seachanges since I originally started my research has been young people “coming out” at an earlier and earlier age. A 2001 study suggested the average age being 15. The advent of the internet, chat rooms, and websites like this one (and lol, Oprah)have made a remarkable difference in identity formation issues for GBLTQ youth.
The bottom line for me–gay identity formation can often take a different pathway with people of color than with Euro-Americans, and this may account for the resulting differences in the ethnicities reflected in the reported article.
SeaFlood
Eagledancer,
In your first response, the thing that annoyed me to no end was the way in which you normalized and made invisible whiteness. So that for “gay” people, they could locate “gayness” as first because they didn’t have to “be concerned” with “perky race”. Because they didn’t have to “be concerned” with it unlike people of color for whom “gayness” was located second or third on this invisible/constructed hierarchy, somehow, it made them “less than.”
While I know you did not say all of this, I think it is rather easy to deduce this from your statement.
Also, the idea that People of color in interracial relationships do not negotiate race is… wow. I am in an interracial relationship myself, but I recall having to deal with gender deviation first — before being B/black or gay and thus the two are actually more tied together — not able to be ranked as a hierarchy. I wonder about your methodology… did you allow for that kind of rendering to happen in your study or did you make everyone submit to your ordering of the world?
I agree with you, gay identity formation THEORY has to be different for people according to, not only race, but class, economic and educational agency, gender — this list can go on and on. However, I think you did make white invisible and thus normative in your first statement — which I think is what the study is all about and has been something discussed by B/black GBLT people for as long as I can remember as an excuse for all the bad behavior of white GBLT people as individuals and as a collective.
The FACT that when the word “gay” is used as a identity formation that it does NOT USUALLY include people of color is incredibly telling — for example. You can see just by looking through some of the topics that touch on race and queerness all through this site.
Also, I was out at 14. A B/black gender-deviant male-bodied “boy” in South Carolina. And I do not think I was the “exception” — if only because I had sex with the others who were in my “group.”
I think there’s a lot of stuff that looks like “common sense,” but to allude to Gramsci, it’s just that… common. And being that it is common, it cannot be called upon to adequate address of comment on the *reality* going on out there in the world. Perhaps white gay kids are coming out earlier, but I posit that B/black gay kids have always come out that early — if only to themselves, and if their community didn’t always know and point it out to them.
The “clannishness” you speak of in regard to white gay people (indeed, to use Euro-American is problematic since they do not have a relationship to Europe, but to whiteness which is the American part… but then, I have studied critical race theory which gets into formations… especially via Omi and Winant…)is EXACTLY the problem. It keeps other people out and makes the sight narrow and conservative.
I feel your analysis suffers from an understanding about white identity racial formation theory and how it intersects with gay identity formation. Because it leaves that out, it reads rather two-dimensionally without problematizing anything, yet leading to thinking that is… well… has the chance to be dehumanizing.