Movie talk 3

Brother to brother

The movie is dedicated the Bruce Nugent, a black writer from Harlem Renaissance. It expressively describes the struggles of the communities of minorities: black VS white, and more importantly, gay black VS staight black community.

One of the striking feature of black community is their tendency to be very homophobic. George and I discussed this a lot, trying to understand why. In a reasonable way one minority group tends to understand other minorities since they are all treated badly historically. Black group is one of the minorities, gay is another. Why is black community so against gay man, especially gay black man?

When I was in Atlanta this October, my friend and I took a taxi to a club. Knowing that our destination is a gay club, the taxi driver, who is an African American, started to question us the morality of gay community. He did not care us being gay, but cared that his children might be gay - because he thinks that gay people are going to teach his children to be gay. With this theory, he condemned the existence of gay people. He seems a hard working man struggling to support his family, a man who goes to church every weekend, a man who might be very kind to majority of people who are not gay. Knowing the hardness of changing somebody's opinion, I tried anyway but failed to do so. With this pity in mind, I deeply feel sorry for him.

When a group, especially a minority group, had struggled to gain some position in a society, keeping the current status is so hard which makes it even harder for this group to be more progressive, because they are afraid to lose. Black people are stereotyped as strong masculinity. It is an interesting phenomenon that sometimes people hate being stereotyped, but on the other hand, subconciously they are happy what they are stereotyped as. In a hidden manner, it seems Black community enjoyed this stereotype although they might deny it. Being a gay Black man is a big slap on this.

In the opposite to previous theory, South Africa just legalized gay marriage. Why there is such a big difference between African American in the U.S and Black people in South African? Almost 80% of South African population is Black. With such majority, with continuous cruel and enduring fight for civil rights for centuries, are Black people in South Africa not afraid to lose?