They Still Don’t Want to Cruise Your Type

• In Event: 474 - Section on Race, Gender and Class Paper Session. Representations of Race, Class, and Gender in Popular Culture and Media

Abstract

Despite this wide-spread recognition that racism is rampant in the gay community, few scholars have attempted to explore the nature of racism experienced by gay men of color. Instead, most studies on the experiences of gay men of color use racism as a taken-for-granted social fact and focuses on the effects of racism rather than on racism itself. Imagined this way, racism is always thought to be something that exerts an influence on something else, as if it is outside of the social processes that create it. The problem with this definition is that it is often treated as a given with little attempt to expand on not only what it is but on how it exerts an influence. In this paper, I attempt to examine how racism manifests itself in the gay community and examine specifically how gay men of color are excluded from the gay community. To do so, I analyze comments made by gay men on various online websites that cater to a gay audience.

Author

• Chong-suk Han, Middlebury College