by Jon Pressick
My first queer relationships didn’t seem to live up to all they were built up to be. In all of my subsequent relationships with white men, I was unable to experience a sense of solidarity and kinship. Dominant narratives of homosexuality describe it as “same-sex” desire: we hear stories about how men “know how to please other men better because they have a penis.” We hear how same-sex relationships are more functional because both parties “get one another.” These ideas never really seemed to make sense to me. All of my relationships with white men have felt much more conflicted, racially charged, and oppositional. Embracing a white male body never feels comfortable, natural, same. It feels foreign.
As I began to participate in (white) queer communities I recognized that what attracted to me to these boys—what had always attracted me to whiteness—was its difference from me. Whiteness was a commodity, a property that I didn’t own and was systematically denied. I wanted to be with white guys because I was attracted to their power. I found myself turning down incredibly charming queer people of color, because I just didn’t get the same power trip.
My early and uncritical experiences with white men reminded me that I can never have access to this cultural capital, that I will always be Brown, no matter how much queers profess to be “one community.” I began to realize the extreme racism and colorism that governs much of queer life (especially for queer men): the lighter you are, the more attractive you are. The darker you are, the more likely you are to be friend-zoned.
The majority of the times I found myself invisible to the white queer gaze. I met white boys with dating profiles that read: No Asians/No Fems. Sexual racism and femmephobia like this was rarely as explicit; it manifested itself in more silent and pernicious ways: always being the “friend” and never anything more. When I would confront my white queer friends about why they didn’t date people of color they’d often say things like: “I don’t see race—get over it, it’s not important! ” And though they would often profess liberal and antiracist politics, they would still only sleep with and date other white cis men. When I began to meet white queer men who did date across the color line they would often say that race wasn’t central to their desire or relationship. The idea was that being gay already involved transgressing one taboo, why not jump over another? I heard this narrative a lot: queer desire is inherently transgressive so therefore it is somehow exempt from complicity.
Those white queer men who did express interest in people of color often articulated it in ways that were just as problematic, just in a reverse direction. One white boy told me that he had always wanted to be with a Brown man. He told me that I felt like a real man (disregarding how I identified). And, at the time, I not only accepted it, I fetishized it. For the first time in my life I experienced validation from the very body that taunted me growing up. I performed my race—in its most stereotypical forms—for him so that I could maintain his desire. In subsequent relationships I experienced similar fetishization. It manifested itself in sometimes subtle ways—comments on my rugged masculinity (gesturing to histories of associations with bodies of color and primitive animality) and cloaked racist sayings like “all South Asians are so sexy” (as if one sixth of the world’s population looks the same).
In all of these experiences—the ones where I was hyper invisible and hyper visible—one theme remained constant: I was always reduced to my race. My race was the primary basis of my desirability or undesirability. I never was able to enter interactions where my race was not salient—the paradigm established was that I was always the one with “the race,” while whiteness remained unmarked.
After severally racially charged experiences with white men I found myself in some of the deepest and most visceral racial trauma of my life. I found myself predicating my very self-worth on validation from white men. It didn’t matter how many people of color were attracted to me, only white guys counted. It didn’t matter to me how successful I was in school or how effective of an activist I was, only validation by white men could make me happy. What had begun as a survival strategy—fetishizing the very white men who made my life miserable in high school as a way to establish a sense of control at least in the realm of fantasy—ended up becoming a nightmare. This is how white supremacy operates: it offers you a promise of acceptance, always at a distance, so that you are always running after it. It is always an abusive dynamic: it creates dynamics where your entire self worth is predicated on the very people who hurt you the most.
There came a point in my life when I could not longer submit myself to the constant humiliation of arguing for my humanity to the very men who oppressed me. It might sound dramatic but there is something deeply personal about sexual intimacy—espe-cially for those of us who have grown up our entire lives being told that we are ugly. It was never about a date or a hookup, it was always about my worth is as a human being. I realized that I needed a more sustainable way to develop self-worth. Like so many people of color before me I sought refuge in my own. I began to build intentional community with other queer people of color and it was in these spaces that I experienced the healing justice I had always longed for. I recognized how my attraction to whiteness was linked to my own racial self-hatred. I recognized the ways in which desire for whiteness helps justify the continued subordination of my peoples. I finally felt part of spaces that held me in my entirety. Slowly I have begun to unhinge my sexuality from whiteness and expand the horizon of my desires. Naturally it’s a process, but I have finally begun to feel like I have control of my desires and I’d like to think that means something in a world determined to relinquish control from people of color.
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
My story is similar to those of so many queer and trans people of color. We each have our own unique experiences of being disenfranchised by queer communities, but across the board we express our collective grief and rage at how queerness has come to signify whiteness. So many of us have never been able to disassociate our racial oppression from our gender and sexual oppression. The idea of seeing these as separate struggles not only feels inconsiderate, it feels deliberately misleading and violent. Yet, race neutrality and outright racial hostility continues to persist in queer white spaces and progressive sexuality spaces more generally. Many queers continue to organize, fuck, make art, dream, and build together in ways that do not actively address white supremacy. It is important to establish that this is not about ignorance; this is about power.
Race neutrality is not a passive act; it is a conscious act of prejudice. The refusal to engage with race is actually an acceptance of white supremacy. In our “postracial” and neoliberal moment racism actually operates by white people and other privileged people proclaiming that “race has nothing to do with.” What I have tried to demonstrate with my story is that the supposed universality of sexual identity politics actually masks over racism. Sexual identity politics only map well onto the experiences of white privileged people because they were made for them. I am not advocating for the inclusion of race into sexual identity politics. To do so would be to imply that racism is the exception, and not the norm. Rather, I am suggesting that we need fundamentally different ways of talking about and organizing around desire. I’d like to close with several suggestions that we can consider moving forward.
1. We need to stop expecting conversations about race and sexuality to only be had by people of color. To do so is to suggest that race only belongs to people of color and therefore to leave whiteness unchecked.
Race should not just be the intellectual and political preoccupation of people of color. White people also have a race. Whiteness has the privilege to be unmarked, especially when it comes to sexuality politics. While it might not be as immediately explicit, white people have also had their desires and identities mediated by their race. White people who are in relationships with other white people are still actively creating and engaging in race. Indeed, white fetish is not just a peculiar phenomenon found among people of color, rather it is
the dominant framing of a world where whiteness is marketed as desirable. It should not be controversial or stigmatized to talk about racial fetish; it should be a practice we all engage in. None of us are somehow outside of white supremacy. White supremacy is a system and we experience its symptoms every single day. Our assumption should be that any idea or politics expressed in a racist society is going to be shaped by racist values. It is only until we can name racism that we can begin to have conversations about how to confront it. If you expect people of color to always be the ones to bring up race then actually you are making people of color do all the labor (and where have we seen that before!).
2. There is nothing inherently progressive about queer sexual identity or relationships. Relying on an equation that positions queer relationships as somehow more “subversive” than “heterosexual” relationships is racist.
Queer people often present themselves as more progressive than the average “straight” person because they are “less conservative.” Yet this binary between “conservative” and “progressive” masks over how both of these groups are complicit in white supremacy. Oppression is not just a feeling or attitude; it is a system of power. False dichotomies between “progressive” and “conservative” distract us from having real conversations about structural complicity. There is nothing really progressive about a politics of sexuality alone. Sexual identity politics has done the remarkable act of creating norms in which we are not allowed to question people’s desires or relationships because they are somehow “personal.” The political act in sexual identity politics is announcing or declaring one’s sexuality. Once this is accomplished one is magically outside of any scrutiny. This leaves us no space to comment on the oppressive forces at work when white cis men only sleep with other white cis men. Only focusing on gender without attention to race results in always positioning white people as more progressive. The real work of any politics around sexuality shouldn’t be just the articulation of our desires, but also the tough conversations about power and desire and the even more difficult task of transforming our desires.
3. Anchoring sexual identity to gender/sex object choice alone is racist.
The dominant understanding of sexual identity is that our identities are linked to the “sex” we are attracted to. Along with the inherent transphobia in such a paradigm, it is important to establish that the only people in this world who have the privilege to understand their sex/gender outside of race are white people.
Therefore, to establish that sexual orientation is solely about “gender” or “sex” (as if these things exist outside of race) is to perpetuate white supremacy. “Men” and “women” do not exist as stable and oppositional categories when you take into account racial and gender identity, and other various registers of difference. When we experience attraction it is not only due to sex or gender, it is also due to a host of other factors (class, race, education status, et cetera.) If we only narrate our identities through gender object choice we aren’t actually being honest about how power operates. The privileging of sex/gender in the ways that we discuss desire is not just coincidental, it is a carefully crafted strategy to maintain racial dominance.
4. We should no longer speak about desire and preference as if they exist outside of systems of power.
People are not born beautiful; they become beautiful because they have access to power. We live in a world that constantly teaches us that the very people who control the world (white cis able-bodied men) are the most attractive people. We are taught to fetishize whiteness and masculinity because our desire helps fuel our own subordination. Therefore the idea that our desires are somehow fixed or innate and cannot be changed over time is also about saying that racial and gender inequality in this world can never be changed. We must stop pretending that our sexual and romantic preferences are somehow separate from the material distribution of power in this world. We must stop pretending that sexual and romantic desire somehow exists outside of the other desires for power, wealth, property, and conquest. We must stop pretending as if we do not inherit our desires from histories of colonialism and contemporary white supremacy. We cannot ever fully disintegrate our individual wants from what we have been told to desire. We need to become more comfortable speaking about the ways in which all of our desires are implicated in these violent systems and how we actively (re) create power through exercising our desires.
5. We should stop prescribing identities and narratives for people and instead allow them to self-determine their own narratives.
What is, I think, both tremendously intimidating and exciting about sexuality is that when we take seriously how unique each one of our life histories is and how deeply our attractions and identities are linked to these histories, we recognize that no one word or identity can ever hold the complexity. Moving beyond sexual identity isn’t just about postmodern intellectual radicalism, it’s actually about doing what makes the most sense. Sexual identities do not actually adequately describe anyone; they are short signifiers that are more reductive than they are generative. What I hope we can do as people invested in sexual liberation is create more spaces for people to be more than a word or an identity. I want more spaces where people can speak honestly about all of the trauma we have experienced and discuss the ways in which our histories of violence (or lack thereof) have mediated our desires. I want us to stop attempting to categorize, label, and contain all of our pluralities. I want us to be able to embrace the chaos that comes from really doing meaningful introspective work on our desires without falling into the trap of identity. The idea of categorizing our sexuality into discrete identities is a colonial phenomenon. This process of challenging sexual identity politics and allowing a space to self-narrate our desires and identities is part of a greater struggle against white supremacy.
Sex, Lies and Public Education
Lynn Comella
What are Nevada high school students learning about sex, and how are they learning it? We talked to a few local graduates to find out.
Veronica grew up in a Catholic household where sex was never discussed except when her parents told her, “Don’t have it.”
In tenth grade, while attending Vo-Tech (now known as Southeast Career Technical Academy), she had a semester-long health class taught by one of the school’s athletic coaches. “He was a very nice man, but he sat at his desk and put in videos,” says Veronica, one of a group of young women I interviewed about their experiences with sex education.
Most of the class dealt with nutrition. When it came time for the unit on sex, the videos they watched barely covered the basics—anatomy, menstruation, hormones. Veronica’s big takeaway? Make sure you shower and wear deodorant.
Veronica became pregnant with her first child at eighteen, the last of her group of five high school friends to have a baby. The day she learned she was pregnant, she also learned she had a sexually transmitted infection. “I didn’t know enough about birth control to use it. Eventually I learned about condoms, but nobody was using them, so I thought, ‘Well, if it’s okay for guys not to use them, it must be all right.’”
Today, Veronica is a thirty-two-year-old married mother of two working toward completing her undergraduate degree at UNLV. She says she can’t help but wonder how her life might have been different if she had access to better information about birth control and sex.
After a bill designed to create uniform standards for sex education in Nevada public schools died in the state Senate on May 24, angry finger-pointing immediately began over who was to blame—Senate Democrats who sidestepped the issue or the bill’s opponents, who argued it would advance a pro-abortion agenda.
AB230 would have required school districts to offer age-appropriate and medically accurate sex education to students, including information about safe and effective methods of contraception, gender stereotypes, negotiating healthy relationships and the prevention and treatment of sexually transmitted infections. The bill’s supporters also hoped it would help reduce Nev
ada’s teen pregnancy rate, the fourth highest in the nation.
One group, however, was conspicuously absent from much of the public discussion about the bill: students. What, I wondered, had recent Nevada high school students learned in their school-based sex education? What was discussed, what wasn’t, and where did young people turn to fill in the gaps?
No Uniform Standards
While Nevada currently has statewide standards for health education, they do not include a specific set of guidelines for teaching about sex, leaving those decisions to local school districts.
“Our current regulations for sex education in Clark Country are abstinence-based, which includes medically accurate, fact-based information on contraception, pregnancy and prenatal care, fetal development and parenthood and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV and AIDS,” says Shannon La Neve, K-12 health coordinator for the Clark County School District.
What students actually learn, I discovered, varies dramatically from school to school and across different school districts. And judging from the accounts of the young women I interviewed, it doesn’t seem like much has changed since Veronica graduated in 1998.