At one point, she alleges that gay men have the “privilege” of being able to disavow their sexuality, a privilege not shared by black women. But his behavior reflects cluelessness about historical origins, not a malicious attempt to co-opt black womanhood.Īnd Mannie’s essay has its blind spots, too. That Chelsea-based management consultant whose Grindr bio reads “Yas, hunty” is trying to express himself using a language that he views as part of his own history. So gay men who are “acting like black women” are presuming that nothing has changed, that all struggles gay men have faced to claim space in the world for themselves have been equivalent throughout history. There can be a flattening effect when gay people in 2014 look at the world there’s no organized corpus of gay history, and often little sense of perspective. Mannie is right that gay men have a lot of reckoning to do.
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TV shows like Logo’s RuPaul’s Drag Race (on which white Dallas-based performer Laganja Estranja talked nonstop about “truth tea”) or Bravo’s Fashion Queens (on which black gay men “read” one another once a week) broadcast out to the masses a manner of being that owes something to an idea of black womanhood, but also to gay people from the past. “Throwing shade,” “reading,” “truth tea,” a certain fuck-you sassy posture - all of the mannerisms Mannie sees as stolen from black women have echoed through drag culture since the 1980s. The “realness” those performers prized allowed them to express themselves, through the guise of characters who owed a lot to the women who were their mothers, sisters, and friends. They’re mimicking gay men from another era, who found a way to forge an identity amid difficult circumstances. The 1990 drag-ball documentary assayed the lives of poor, largely black gay men who built an alternative culture - one with a language that would seem to borrow heavily from what Mannie calls “Shanequa from around the way.” And the white gay men I’ve met who most frequently speak, or tweet, in a faux-urban patois aren’t trying mimic Tyler Perry’s Madea character or any real-life black woman.
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I’d trace its lineage to the movie Paris Is Burning. It’s just that the behavior Mannie’s noticing has a more complicated origin story than what she describes as “ that you’re a minority woman just for the sake of laughs.” And while her argument may not be perfect, she’s hit upon a very real phenomenon: of white gay men crossing lines of good taste or casual racism by “acting black.” An ambitious ethnic-studies major could stand outside the gay bar Metropolitan on a Saturday night and gather enough material for a thesis project. You can be whomever you want to be.” Another writer called Mannie’s work “incorrect and offensive” and rewrote the whole thing as a request that straight people “stop stealing gay culture.”įirst of all, Mannie’s work is that of a college student - she was writing from a specific experience and for a specific context, even if Time brought her thoughts to wider audience. One representative tweet called Mannie’s work “ignorant & homophobic” Thought Catalog declared, “It’s all bullshit.
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“I don’t care how well you can quote Madea, who told you that your booty was getting bigger than hers, how cute you think it is to call yourself a strong black woman, who taught you to twerk, how funny you think it is to call yourself Quita or Keisha or for which black male you’ve been bottoming - you are not a black woman, and you do not get to claim either blackness or womanhood.” “I need some of you to cut it the hell out,” Mannie wrote. Last week, Time’s website published an essay with the headline “ Dear White Gays: Stop Stealing Black Female Culture.” Written by Sierra Mannie, a rising senior at the University of Mississippi, it had originally appeared in her student newspaper.
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Photo: Off White Productions/Courtesy Everett Collection