Black Men's Xchange New York

From the BMX NY EDITORIAL PAGE

Gay = White =  Short-Circuit to Effective Black HIV Prevention

by JM Green 

Considering the fact that nearly half of all Black men who have sex with men in New York are HIV infected, and that this trend is on the increase, perhaps it’s time we recognize what is not working about such prevention strategies as have been deployed among us thus far. Key to developing effective strategies for stemming the tide of HIV/AIDS in the Black community is overcoming our apprehension to acknowledging Black male homosexuality, commonly referred to as "gay." We have long known that the epicenter of the incidence of HIV/AIDS in the Black community is among Black men who have sex with men (BMSM) and BMSM who also have female partners.  As it happens, there are still many more BMSM who do not identify as gay than there are who do.  Hence, the necessity of coining the term in the first place. 

 As a result of the literal and figurative emasculation of Black men, manhood is a precious and fragile commodity in the Black community.  At the heart of all the struggles Africans have waged for freedom in America from abolition and manumission, to desegregation and Civil Rights, to Black Power and Black Consciousness, has been the call for our acknowledgement as men. Intensifying our anxiety about manhood is the patriarchal American context in which manhood is valued in terms of power, aggression, domination, and which is undergirded by misogyny.  By and large, Black men have been out of the power and domination loop for some time now.  And, as a function of internalized white supremacy, where aggression is concerned, we generally tend to reserve that behavior for each other. Misogyny prompts disrespect of women.  Regarding homosex, where a man would have another man as would a woman, those men are deemed even less worthy of respect than women.  In this environment, the anxiety about manhood is heightened exponentially among Black men.  

Our collective anxiety about manhood has created the shame, guilt and fear around homosexuality which has for too long kept us silent about the much deadlier threat of a pandemic which is still infecting and killing us at an alarming rate. Discussions about homosexuality, which in most people’s minds is synonymous with gay identity, and which many Black folk see as “White,” make the topic threatening in multiple ways. In turn, we rarely get to HIV/AIDS.  And, even when we do, the topic is rarely considered multi-dimensionally. It is time we muster the courage to face our fears and create safe spaces within which we critically examine anti-homosexual dispositions in the Black community as a precursor to dialogues about effective means of stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS.