Invisibility

In high school, I was the kind of invisible that helped me navigate my social environment. My name wasn't constantly being spoken. Outside of my own circles, very few people knew me. I was no blip on the radar. While it meant spending weekends with few or no people (or wasting away at work...), it was nice not to be involved in any drama. I was the kind of invisible that helped me coast.

But now, in a time where I've developed much more of a racial identity, I'm dealing with a new kind of invisibility. Since I was 15, I've had plenty of time to develop a gay identity. Besides resistance from my parents and a change in faith, things more or less went on course. I have no problems assuming a gay identity. A Black identity, however, is something that has seemed beyond my grasp for so long. I had to get over the recognition of my difference (talking 'White', being called Oreo, saying 'I'm not really Black', and my unfortunate buying into each of these scenarios) but also a growing bitterness toward my own community (So I don't sag or listen to rap that often, why don't I belong?). Hanging around White people for my developmental years was also a big part in not assuming a Black identity besides checking that box on various forms of paperwork.

Yet, I've made leaps and bounds. I started to question the biases I've had toward Black people. I've started recognizing that though some conform to stereotypes, just as I do with a gay identity, it doesn't mean they are lesser people, it's just how some people express themselves and that expression just so happens to be congruent with established stereotypes. I've started to work past the issues regarding my Blackness, the Blackness of others, and what it means to be Black (still not sure, but I refuse to let anyone else dictate for me what my own Blackness means and how it should be showcased). What I have also encountered is the aforementioned invisibility that comes from the intersection of being gay and a person of color.

What I found is that I was immersed in and helped perpetuate a system that downgraded the value of LGBT PoC. I never felt like I belonged with people of my own color, so I hung around the White kids. In the LGBT community, I've found that, often, if you aren't White, you find yourself in an invisible struggle for a 'ticket', for a place at the table. I was in between worlds. It didn't help that I didn't push past my own biases until very recently, so I looked at and treated other Black gay men differently. I was caught, and still find myself, in a struggle to assert my visibility while furthering that bullshit system.

This struggle isn't easy to explain. In the LGBT community, race is a topic easily and apparently best dismissed. I've covered this before: that entire argument hinges on the assumption that what is not seen does not exist. However, even though I haven't been victim to overt homophobia and racism, I cannot deny the existence of a system that sees me as a lesser man for being gay, a lesser man for being Black, and invisible for being Black and gay. I also cannot deny my place within this system, as an agent of that same casting of invisibility of my Black homosexual, bisexual and trans brothers and sisters.

Shaking off my own invisibility can no longer involve getting those pretty White boys to date me (I've already dated pretty White boys who didn't have their heads up their asses and who were willing and able to engage in discussions of race). It can involve being honest about how I've felt, whether those feelings were justified or not. It can involve looking privilege in the eye and having the audacity to say something. It can involve seeing my Black, Latino(a), Asian, Native American, etc etc LGBT people as beautiful, just as I have come to see my own skin as beautiful.

I may still continue to date White men. I may still be an agent in a rather horrid system. Yet, at the end of my life, I want to look back to moments after this one, and know that I stood up and asserted my existence and refused to participate in systems that treat others as 'less than.' I'm not invisible. I'm not a less than. I simply am.