Ten People, Ten Colors: A History of Gay Interracialism

From the year 2000 U.S. Census, an unprecedented statistical insight emerged: lesbians and gays were twice as likely as heterosexuals to choose a partner or spouse of another 'race.' Against this milieu of gay interracial compatibility, evidence abounded of racism within LGBT communities. Gay 'visibility,' in the form of increased media coverage, exposed the inequities within queer cultures and the dominance of urban gay white male norms. The mythical pink pound and almighty gay dollar, available to just a few, in fact obscured the great disadvantages facing most LGBT people in the workplace and in domestic life. New institutions emerged, however, to promote intercultural cooperation among LGBT persons. They not only fostered interpersonal relationships across boundaries of race, ethnicity, and nationality, but also combated racism, sexism, and classism more broadly. At the beginning of the new millennium, what forces lay behind this heightened awareness of race and its consequences for queer communities?

Intertwining the realms of representation and lived experience, this project examines the historical contexts for these phenomena, as well as their contemporary iterations. In nine chapters, the monograph first probes recent controversies surrounding photographic representations, as with the summer 2005 exhibition 'Icons of the Gay Community'; grass roots campaigns, including the 2004 OutRage! protests against Jamaican 'murder music' and the MOBO (Music of Black Origins) awards; and popular stage performances, radio shows, and internet animations, including the 2002 boycott of blackface drag artist Shirley Q. Liquor. As historical backdrop, racist stereotypes and cultural practices are pinpointed in the most influential of gay sex manuals, The Joy of Gay Sex, published in multiple editions since 1976.

Part two of the book juxtaposes the cultural invention of gay racial hierarchies against social histories of interracial relationship building. A close reading of the popular independent film Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss (1998) exposes emerging norms of beauty and standards of desirability privileging young gay white men over older men of color. By contrast, additional chapters interrogate East-West scholarship funds which, from the 1950s, brought young Asian men to U.S. universities and into the homes of their older white male companions, as well as queer marriages of convenience, the creative coupling and collective householding designed to circumvent immigration controls and bring together various white/non-white, citizen/'alien' partners and trios into new relations of kinship.

The book's final part charts the rise of gay organizations and networks enabling intercultural interaction, coalition, and struggle. Departing from dominant psychoanalytic frames of racial fetishization, oral histories allow the articulation of life stories by men of color engaged in interracial liaisons. And visual/textual analysis is brought to bear on explicitly multiracial HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns. The book closes with a comparative history of the Long Yang Club International (LYC) and Black and White Men Together (BWMT). Founded in London in 1983, now with thirty-five chapters in nine countries, the former envisions social bridge-building in terms both continental and hemispheric, with frequent references to 'East-West' relations. Formed in 1980, with the majority of its thirty-plus chapters in the United States, the latter views its mission as both social and political, emphasizing, as they attempt to overcome, categories of race and ethnicity.

In sum, through an analysis of cultural production and social history, the project argues a historical transformation in queer engagements with racial difference, from cataloguing and occasionally condemning various white/non-white dyads, viewed hierarchically through the fetish and discourses of colonialism, to a queer cosmoplitanism, embracing multiple types and multiple intimacies.