2/25/2009

Sometimes I Forget I'm a Nigger

In the spring of 1992, all hell broke lose in LA when a jury acquitted four police officers on trial for the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King. The Los Angeles Riots of 1992 that followed shook Angelenos to the core, including this Angeleno.

While hunkering down in my home, I received a phone call from
David Kalmansohn, a most-fantastic editor at Frontiers Newsmagazine, who wanted to know, a) if I was all right, and b) whether or not I wanted to write a piece about the uprising taking place in our city.

At the time I was working on my novel
Uprising, which centered around an assassination plot. During the riots, I put it aside, having suddenly lost my appetite for fictional violence.

However, writing about the nonfictional violence happening in our city was a good distraction from watching and waiting to see if it was going to reach my front door. Or window.


Thankfully, the violence never reached my immediate world. Thanks to Mr. Kalmansohn, the following essay was published shortly after the riots in the May 22, 1992 issue of Frontiers Newsmagazine.

Sometimes I Forget I'm a Nigger ...

You know, one of those people with big lips and charcoal skin who are always up to no good, members of a less intelligent race who would sooner stick a gun in your gut before making a positive contribution to the world.

No doubt my memory lapse is due to the fact that, as I evolve with my sexuality, I willingly become more identified with being gay. No doubt it is also because I have achieved a slice of the American Dream, however small: college education, good job, safe dwelling, well-to-do friends.

No doubt it is also due to a desire to suppress pain that goes even deeper than what I have endured as a gay man, for I knew I was black long before I knew I was gay. Even when I bought into society's belief that I should be ashamed of both qualities, I could hide my gayness, but not my blackness.
"Wherever I go, I can't get away from having labels and stereotypes hung around my neck."
All of these things contribute to me forgetting I'm a nigger. But not for long. Something always happens to remind me I am a part of America's most historically feared and hated subculture.

Like when I was a freshman at USC at the dawn of the '80s. Fresh off the boat from the Midwest, bursting with dreams of the all-American college life, I was walking by the Sigma Chi fraternity house late one night during my first week of school when a burly anonymous voice from behind a dark window called me nigger.

Like every time I'm alone in an elevator with a white female and I can feel the tension breathing from her pores and see the fear in her downcast eyes, making me want to say, “Hey, not every black man wants to rape and/or rob you.”

Like in West Hollywood, where many men will cruise anything with a heartbeat, but look right through me because my tan is permanent. It is there where white friends seen out with me have been called “nigger-lover” the next day at the Athletic Club.

It is on Santa Monica Boulevard where pretty boys speeding by in convertibles have shouted racial epithets to me as I strolled down “our” street. And it is in West Hollywood where I have ignored and been ignored by other black gays, each of us internalizing the racism perpetrated against us.
"For every ounce of prejudice hurled my way, my brothers in South Central live it tenfold."
Yet wherever I go, I can't get away from having labels and stereotypes that have little to do with me hung around my neck. Strangers constantly approach me, eagerly asking if I'm an athlete. When I say no, they're disappointed and usually have no further use for interaction, save informing me I should play sports, what with my height and body structure.

What if I want to be a cheerleader? A brain surgeon? A writer? What these people are really saying: the only worthwhile black man in society is the athlete, whose value lies in his ability to entertain with uncanny feats of physicalness.

The stereotyping isn't confined to non-blacks. Recently, outside a local basketball arena, a black cop out to catch scalpers accosted me when, from a distance, he saw two white friends of mine handing me money. Brutishly he warned me about selling tickets to these two as if that were the only possible association between two whites and one black.

To exonerate myself, my friends had to give the cop my full name, then I had to produce ID to prove we all knew one another. Made me feel like a nigger.

Perhaps the ultimate reminder of who I am came in the Rodney King verdict and subsequent riots. For every ounce of prejudice hurled my way, my brothers and sisters in South Central live it tenfold.
"This form of social outcry also exacts a personal toll."
For me the prejudice is somewhat sanitized. In elevators of friendly office buildings. On the clean streets of Boys Town. For most blacks, the disease of racism festers in every cell of their existence in an uglier, suffocating manner.

You grow up in blighted, roach-infested trenches. Your schools do little to prepare you for college. Or life. Your reality of America is not that you can grow up to be anything you want to be. Becoming the president of IBM isn't an option. Neither is being an astronaut at NASA or an executive at Paramount.

Sure, a few have reached these lofty places and live like the Huxtables, but to the boys and girls growing up in the South Centrals of this country, reality is “you're black, you're not wanted here and we're going to keep you in your place in the ghetto.”

Reality is life and death in a war zone created by poverty created by a system that never cared enough about them. Reality is an ingrained fear of the law and police, a fear fueled by a history of the courts literally letting whites get away with murder against blacks.

Given this bleak picture, and given the turn for the worse for minorities under Reagan-Bush, is it any surprise that something snapped when a suburban jury let four cops go even after their crimes had been captured on video? Not to anyone with a finger on the pulse of the poor, tired and hungry. Not to any student of history.

This is what happens when people are oppressed. You can keep them down, kick them and beat them for so long, but eventually they will rise up and say “Enough!” in the only way that seems to get attention: violence. It's history. In 19th-century France. In Colonial America. In hotbeds of dispute all over the world today. It seems to be the law of man.

It was this perverse sense of “I told you so” that danced with the sadness and fear within me as I watched the burning and destruction, neither condemning nor endorsing the mayhem, but understanding that the rioters were really saying, “We want in on the American Dream.”

Even the looters were saying this by their actions, most of them symbolically grabbing something, anything, for free as if taking a spiteful swipe at an America that is constantly pumping their heads full of images of sexy, material wealth always just out of reach.

But this form of social outcry also exacts a personal toll. I think of my barber shop of over 10 years, in the heart of the neighborhood near the rich white bastion known as USC.

On the third day of the riots, as the TV reporter rummaged through the heavily looted strip mall containing that shop, the tears which had been welling up in my eyes for three days finally came cascading down. I cried for Nick, my barber for nearly a decade, who cut my hair for next to nothing when I was a starving Trojan, and from whom you could still get a good haircut and a rambunctious dose of ghetto gossip for only nine bucks.

Twice a month it was my way of keeping in touch with the Indianapolis inner city I knew for the first seven years of my life before my family moved to the 'burbs. Surrounded by the distinctive flavors and rhythms of urban life, I listened to barbers and customers alike going on about a son's baseball game, a friend's newborn baby, Bush vs. Clinton or the Lakers or the Raiders. Nick and his fellow barbers staked their lives on those nine dollar haircuts, working up to 12 hours a day, six days a week. For now, no more.

During the fiercest days of battle, I was struck by how many white people, friends and strangers, told me I had nothing to be worried about: I was safe. As if my property and my body weren't capable of perishing in the random fires and chaotic hail of bullets.

Was there anyone in LA who wasn't scared that the violence and flames would flare up on his or her block? Is there anyone who believes it can't reach his or her backyard the next time?

The riots (and the oppression and racism that caused them) affect us all. The sphere of the subject is so vast and varied that to address all its aspects in a few hundred words is impossible. Still, one overwhelming concept resonates through the smoke: As long as blacks continue to be oppressed, the country will continue to live under a smoldering threat of violence.

And blacks will continue to be oppressed as long as racist attitudes prevail. As along as eager freshmen at USC are called niggers by their classmates. As long as many of the GWMs of West Hollywood discriminate against people of color. As long as the government systematically keeps most blacks in the ghetto. In other words, (to borrow the other King's phrase), as long as we all continue to look at people by the color of their skin and not the content of their character.


POSTSCRIPT 2009:
Elderly White Man to Young Black Man: Help!

During the riots, an elderly white man who was in distress in the middle of an intersection cried out to me, pleading for my help as my car idled at the stoplight. I now had a choice: get out, get involved and help the old man, or ignore his pleas in the name of getting home safely before the impending citywide curfew.

Helping the old man meant putting myself at risk, not only from getting out of my car and walking in the middle of a somewhat busy intersection: my black ass doing anything on behalf of a white man in a racially-divided, powder keg of a war zone seemed like a bad idea.

Still, an even worse idea was that of me not helping an elderly man alone and in distress. And what might happen had I not helped. So I got out of my car and helped him push his car to the side of the road. For his distress was not from being attacked by angry black people. His distress was due to car trouble, and he simply needed help getting the huge old clunker out of harm's way until his backup arrived.

As I pushed the car through the intersection, the old white man steering in the driver's seat, images flashed in my mind: black people, white people, cops, whomever, looking at the two of us, misinterpreting the situation and starting another flashpoint of confusion in our racially-divided, powder keg of a war zone.

Fortunately, all remained peaceful. After the elderly white man thanked me, I went on my way, realizing neither one of us had even mentioned the rioting and racial tensions surrounding us.

2/20/2009

WHITES AND LATINS ONLY, A Photo Essay

"The most popular phrase on the gay internet: WHITES AND LATINS ONLY, aka gay racism spelled out in ALL CAPS in case a nigga who's hard of reading logs on."

WHITES AND LATINS ONLY
a photo essay by Randy Boyd

O
n a
ny given day in America, countless gay men surf the Internet and tell the whole wide world: they prefer WHITES AND LATINS ONLY for love and sex.

If only the US Treasury had one dollar for each online personal ad that contained some variation of the phrases, WHITES AND LATINS ONLY, NO BLACKS, NO ASIANS, SORRY, NOTHING PERSONAL, JUST A PREFERENCE.

When I surf websites frequented by gay men, I'm constantly reminded of images from the Segregation Era of the last century, images of "colored" people standing outside restaurants, restrooms, schools, businesses, bars, nightclubs, water fountains, all with signs warning: WHITES ONLY, NO BLACKS.

From where I stand, the Segregation Era lives on in My Racist Gay World. Welcome to my world. This is what it looks like in pictures.


"Anyone in the world can surf the web and find gay men of all ages and races using the exact same slogans and rhetoric used to segregate blacks in the Old South."


"What's with all the WHITES AND LATINS ONLY language on the net? Everywhere you look, fags online are telling the world: I only want white and Latin men!"


"Never have I encountered more racism than I have in the places gay men frequent, a fact that renders any so-called link to black civil rights laughable."


"You may vote for a biracial brutha who's your only light in dark times, but remember this: you yourself have not come a long way. Your WHITES ONLY “preferences” are keeping the legacy of slavery alive and well, faggots of America."


"[Gays] ain't gonna get very far in the polls by shutting out black homos with online language, like, WHITES AND LATINS ONLY. NO BLACKS, NO ASIANS, NO OFFENSE."


"If Senators Jesse Helms and Strom Thurman were still alive, they'd be proud of you fags, living up to their stereotypes and upholding their racial values."


"Gay America possesses a mentality befitting of the ignorant racist ways of the Old South."


"Makes one wonder if racist gay men are aware of the fact that they're using the exact same words and logic of those who tried to keep blacks from sitting at the same lunch counters, going to the same schools, drinking from the same water fountains, marrying their daughters."

"AIDS is back and bigger than ever, but because infection rates are highest among men of color, AIDS is barely on the radar of the (mostly) white men trying to get to the alter."


"Institutionalized racism has migrated online. Online, the racist minds of countless gay men are transparent and blatant."


"What universe are we in? Tell us how you really feel about niggers. Oh, wait, you just did, and you do it every single day in ALL CAPS on the world wide web for the whole wide world to see."



"Gays, another oppressed minority, are also retarded in their development. Gays are less evolved and more racist than their non-gay counterparts."


"If fags want to compare their journey for civil rights to that of blacks, I suggest fags stop segregating themselves from blacks by declaring WHITES and LATINS ONLY."


"How might black Americans view homosexuality if blacks are no longer segregated from society by gay people declaring WHITES and LATINS ONLY?"


WHITES AND LATINS ONLY

a photo essay by author Randy Boyd

Randy Boyd is the author of four novels, several short stories and many essays, all from the unique point of view of a black man who has been living with HIV/AIDS for more than half his life. His novels have been nominated for five Lambda Literary Awards, including his latest release, Walt Loves the Bearcat, a Lambda Literary Award finalist for Best Romance.

Also check out: My Racist Gay World in words:

The Hypocrisy of Gay Civil Rights
Rising Up Over Gay Racism
Dear Queers, Give Black People Blue Jeans!
10 Ways to Get Blacks To Support Gay Marriage
Poll Dancing with Blacks and Gays
Gay Rights and Civil Wrongs

2/13/2009

My Racist Gay World

In the second half of the 1980s, I was a twenty-something college grad with a decent paying job and a promising career. I was also a lonely man. I'd been single-for-life, not even a whiff of a boyfriend or girlfriend in high school or college.

Adulthood meant a new opportunity to define myself and my search for a life partner. And to have sex! Yes, sex, something else that didn't come so easily in my youth. And although I hadn't ruled out the possibility of sex with women, I knew that I wanted sex and love with a man.

By the mid-to-late 80s, the idea of sex and/or love between two men had been narrowly cast into a singular, socially acceptable definition: gay. And so I began to call myself gay. All things considered, it was a marked improvement over the name gay replaced in my innermost thoughts: fag.
"During the phone sex era, I was introduced to My Racist Gay World."
Subsequently, when I searched for love and sex, not necessarily always in that order, I went to the places frequented by other men who had thrown in with this "whole gay thing." In the 80s, that meant, among other things, the newfangled 900 and 976 phone sex lines. Rack up an outrageous phone bill all in the name of getting your nut. Or just maybe, meet another man who wants sex and love.

During the phone sex era, I was introduced to My Racist Gay World. All it took to be rejected by the majority of men was to simply tell them: "I'm black."

Rejection often came in the form of "my fellow gay men" immediately hanging up on me or pressing a system prompt to dismiss me from their lives, usually taking them to the next contestant in the phone sex dating game. All because I revealed: "I'm black."
"De facto segregation is alive and well in the hearts and minds of many a gay man."
Look Mama! I can do magic! I can make white men disappear! I just them, "I'm black."

"You're black?" some would say, as if to make sure they heard me right. Once my race was confirmed, I was dismissed without another word.

That was My Racist Gay World during the Phone Sex Age in America (circa 1980s-90s). It's a tale told by many a black gay man of that era.

Two decades later, gay men's attitudes towards black men seemed to have changed little. Thanks to our digital world, their prejudice and hatred is now preserved in countless online profiles that reveal a truth many black men have suspected for decades: most gay men, regardless of race, are racists.

Log on and behold the evidence: the infinite variations of phrases such as WHITES ONLY, WHITES AND LATINS ONLY, NO BLACKS, NO ASIANS, it's all there (in ALL CAPS) for anyone to witness, quantify and study. The river of hatred runs deep. De facto segregation is alive and well in the hearts and minds of many a gay man.

Is this America at its best? Is this the best gay men can do?

This is what it's been like living in My Racist Gay World. I love men of all colors. I love women of all colors. But when I look for anything in the gay world, the responses of the men constantly remind me of the Segregation Era of the last century, the one that supposedly ended around the time I was born (1962).

Who can forget the black and white photos of "colored" people standing outside restaurants, restrooms, schools, businesses, bars, nightclubs, water fountains, all with signs warning: WHITES ONLY, NO BLACKS?

From where I stand, the Segregation Era lives on in the gay world, and this is what it looks:

The Hypocrisy of Gay Civil Rights
Rising Up Over Gay Racism
Dear Queers, Give Black People Blue Jeans!
10 Ways to Get Blacks To Support Gay Marriage
Poll Dancing with Blacks and Gays
Gay Rights and Civil Wrongs

Plus, check out WHITES AND LATINS ONLY, a photo essay using gay men's online language in images reminiscent of the segregated Old South.

2/06/2009

Portrait of an HIV-Positive Author

Whatever Happened to that Big Black Cheerleader?

"You used to be a cheerleader for UCLA, but before that you were a yell leader for USC!"

The words of a woman who once approached me at an airport.

"Weren't you that cheerleader for UCLA?"

A question I was asked, wherever I went, for a good fifteen years after college.

"Didn't you used to be a yell leader for USC?"

Another question that followed me for years after college.

"Hey, it's the traitor! He used to be a USC yell leader, but he transferred and became a UCLA cheerleader. He's a traitor! It's the traitor! Look everybody, it's the traitor!"

The loud accusations of a handful of black kids as I escorted my mother to a LA Clippers game at the old Sports Arena in 1986. The kids lived in South Central, hung around the Coliseum and USC football. For years in the 80s, whenever they saw me in public: "There's the traitor. He's a traitor. First he went to USC, then he ..."

My young black hecklers served as inspiration for a similar bit in Walt Loves the Bearcat, my fourth novel about the life of a black male cheerleader (and his QB hubby who comes out and shocks the world).

But what inspired me to become a cheerleader? And why did I do it at two major universities who are bitter crosstown rivals? And what was cheerleading like for this big-assed, six-foot-three, athlete-looking ni ... nice black man?

Find out in the blocks labeled Cheer Up, now and forever at Randy Boyd's Blocks:

So I Thought I Could Dance
USC Yell Leader Has Love Hangover at Fiesta Bowl
UCLA Cheerleader Sacked by Rose Bowl

2/05/2009

I Love My AIDS-Infected Life!

See life through my eyes, walk in my shoes, trade places with me and you just might discover that living with HIV/AIDS doesn't have to be the stuff of nightmares and worst-case-scenarios.

What else can AIDS be?

Find out in the blocks labeled HIV-P.O.V., now and forever at Randy Boyd's Blocks (.com):

Half a Life with AIDS: Randy Boyd in Poz Magazine
Randy Boyd in HIV Positive! Magazine
Could You Fall in Love With This Face?
AIDS Survivor's Guilt
Kiss Me, I Have AIDS
Your Choice: AIDS = Love, or AIDS = Hate
My Own Personal AIDS Tattoo
AIDS Monsters: A Menace to America's Sex Life
Life After Me

2/02/2009

Blocks You May Have Missed

Are you up on the Blocks? Check out these blog posts you may have missed ...

A certain fictional piece about gay ballers in the NBA generated quite a stir on Outsports.com in 2001, and again in February 2007, when John Amaechi, one of the players on the list, admitted he was homosexual. Also on the list was Tim Hardaway, the former player who caused a stir of his own by saying he hated gays.

What does the author of the list know about ballers, you ask? Find out in The Man Who Pegged Amaechi and Hardaway as Gay Speaks Out.

The word gay use to mean happy, then came to mean homo, but now gay is something altogether different, which doesn’t make this gay man very gay about calling himself gay.

I mean, whoever said I have to call myself gay? The same people who anointed me Negro, then black, then African-American? And what about my lifelong dreams of eating out women? I hereby declare, fuck all that!, and announce that I, author Randy Boyd, am still black but No Longer a Homo. So proposition this!

Once upon a time, a young boy contracted HIV/AIDS during the initial AIDS Panic of the 1980s. Like the Beast in Disney's Beauty and the Beast, he was shunned by the townfolk, the schoolfolk and most of the world. Then one day, the world declared the existence of innocent victims of AIDS, the babies and the blood-transfused, like the boy, whose name was Ryan White.

If Ryan White were alive today, he would be in his late thirties. If he went on the Internet and tried to find companionship, he would read countless personal ads looking for mates who are clean and disease-free only. Which makes me wonder: Would You Say That to Ryan White?

He's been in the White House two whole weeks and President Barack Obama has not solved the historic financial crisis I like to call the Repression. What gives? Is the first black man-in-charge gonna make change or what?

But seriously, I kid the President! True, Obama's a genius, but the brutha's gonna need time, help, patience and a few more impossible dreams come true in the next four-to-eight. Or Mr. President can simply follow my path to glory with Three Quick Fixes to End America's Financial Crisis. Yep, it's that easy here on the Blocks!