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Black, gay and proud: the beauty of my intersectionality
Intersectionality. “What does that even mean?”, I recently asked a group of friends. “You’re it”, they replied. As a black, gay man from the Caribbean, I had to admit, they were on to something. It’s an idea that’s very current, this intersectionality (even if it’s been around for a long time). But there’s something striking about having 2 (even 3, if you count my nationality) very complex elements of my identity neatly packaged into a concept that I don’t fully understand myself. On the face of it, interrogating what it means to be both black and gay seems almost as curious as asking what it means to be both white and female or Buddhist and middle-class. It just is. But I’m not so naive that I don’t recognise the identity politics that both of these labels carry, and the fact that they mean so much to so many.
At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s not easy being black and gay. What I mean is, the attempt to live in the full realities of both identities, at the same time…the struggle is, as they say, real. For no other reason that both identities have been at odds in interesting ways, over the course of my life. In the Caribbean, as one would imagine, where most populations are predominantly of black African heritage, masculinity and male power are valued. There’s no ambiguity about the fact that ‘men being men’ forms the basis for the running…
