Beyond the Stereotype of Black Homophobia: Exploring the Potential of Black Allies for Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Students Strides at the federal and state levels are being made to improve the overall climate for gay rights and relationships across the country. However, despite greater acceptance, legislative victories and visibility of gay rights and relationships, homophobia is still widespread in American society (Fone, 2000; Jenkins, Lambert, & Baker, 2009; Schroeder, 2004). No matter the environment, homophobic attitudes permeate all aspects of the US culture, leading to prejudicial attitudes and inequalities that affect everyone in society. Unfortunately, some of these prejudicial attitudes lead to instituting laws that are inherently homophobic (HRC, n.d.). Trends illustrate that more people are coming out at a younger age in society, creating a larger number of `out' students on college campuses. However, the increase in `out' students has also led to an increase of prejudice and discrimination based on sexual orientation more visible on college campuses (Cannick, 2007; D'Augelli & Rose, 1990; Jenkins et al., 2009). Current research indicates Black college students are more likely than other college students to hold negative attitudes toward LGB students. The purpose of this research was to explore and describe perceptions and feelings of Black college students toward LGB students. A qualitative online survey using open and close-ended questions was sent out nationally to a number of college campuses to solicit responses. Major findings include the following: 1) participants have the potential to be allies for and hold positive perceptions of LGB identified students, 2) contact with LGB individuals affects the participants' ability to have more positive perceptions, and 3) participants are receptive to engage in conversations about LGB related issues. Implications of this study suggest collaboration among multicultural offices and other campus constituents for social and academic related programming. In addition, there is a need to provide a space for potential student allies to feel supported and engage in their own self-reflection and learning on how to create community among individuals that hold multiple social identities.

AAMSM (African American men who have sex with men) endure homophobia and racism in their political realities because of their identity. How do multiple oppressions impact the experiences of AAMSM participating within Black churches? Despite the Black church's legacy for liberating African Americans, AAMSM feel demonized and alienated while enduring religion-based homophobia espoused within many Black churches. In the church, AAMSM are pushed further down the hierarchy of oppression and privilege. In response to these observations, this thesis employs a sexual discourse of resistance. I engage this discourse with a literature review in order to discover links between homophobia and AAMSM in an interdisciplinary manner. Jungian psychology is then utilized to interpret internalized oppression. This leads to a discussion of social and religious justice for AAMSM in the Black church through the lens of liberation theology. While the oppressed have become oppressors within the Black church as regards AAMSM, liberation theology affirms all of humanity. Liberation theology provides a message of love for AAMSM and a source of Christian ethics for the Black church.

This thesis analyzes the origin and impact of Black homophobia found in activist spaces of mid- to late-twentieth-century American society. Black gay Americans were subjected to intersecting forms of systemic and cultural oppression that were exceedingly hard to escape due to both the homophobia in Black spaces and the racism in gay spaces. Black gay activists and artists thus had to create their own avenues of expression where they and others could fully embrace what it meant to be Black and gay. This work utilizes a Black feminist framework to explore the roots of Black homophobia and how this type of bigotry was able to so deeply infiltrate Black activist spaces like the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party. Black homophobia originated as a response to White supremacist domination of the Black body, and was able to spread through the community for generations through paths such as hypermasculinity, the Black church, and misogynoir. The experiences and voices of Black gay activists and artists are at the forefront of this work in an effort to shine a light on a group often overlooked by Black history and LGBTQ history alike. This thesis works to fill in one of the many gaps present in the historiography pertaining to Black gay life in America, though more contributions can and should be made in order to shift the field away from its historic focus on the White gay male. An investigation of Black gay exclusion from Black and gay activist spaces offers valuable insight into how Black gay activists and artists persevered and cultivated their own spheres of inclusion within a society that fundamentally opposed virtually every part of their identities.

The apparent ‘invisibility’, or lack of representation of black men in contemporary mainstream gay visual cultures is the primary critical issue that the study engages with. The study presupposes that the frequency with which white men appear in popular representations of ‘gayness’ prevails over that of black men. In order to substantiate this assumption, this study analyses selected issues of the South African queer men’s lifestyle magazine Gay Pages. Gay visual cultures appear to simultaneously conflate ‘whiteness’ and normative homosexuality, while marginalising black gay men by means of positioning ‘blackness’ and ‘gayness’ as irreconcilable identity constructs. Images of the gay male ‘community’ disseminated by queer and mainstream media constantly offer stereotypical, distorted and race-biased notions of gay men, which ingrain the exclusive cultural equation of white men and ideal homomasculinity. The disclosure of racist and selectively homophobic ideologies, which seem to inform gay visual representation, is therefore the chief concern of the dissertation. By investigating selected images that ostensibly embody the complex cultural relationship between race and homomasculinity, the study addresses the following forms of visual representation: colonial representations of ‘blackness’; so-called gay ‘colonial’ representations; black self-representation; gay black self-representation; and contemporary representations of homomasculinity in advertisements and queer men’s lifestyle magazines such as Gay Pages. A genealogy of images is explored in order to illustrate the ways in which ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ are respectively positioned as contradictory to and synonymous with dominant visual representations of homomasculinity in gay visual cultures. The hegemony of ‘whiteness’ in images sourced from colonial systems of representation, queer male art and commercial publicity, for example, are thus critiqued in order to address the various race-based prejudices that appear to be symptomatic of contemporary gay visual cultures. Copyright / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Visual Arts / unrestricted