Creative, timate and personal exprsns om black gay youth across the untry
Contents:
WHEN BEG GAY IS ‘NOT A BIG DEAL’
* richie skye gay *
Near the end of my twentieth birthday, headg to the big twenty-one, I had entered my first gay relatnship. Leadg to my senr year of high school, took me some time to realize that I was gay! While still tryg to accept myself as beg gay, I me across a guy who was my Spanish 2 class and he was the sexit, cholate guy that I have ever seen – not knowg that he was 16 the time; and the first thg that attracted me to him was his lips.
Later we beme more faiar wh each other and one day he greeted me wh a “hey sexy” and I oze up bee I was so shocked, but was still disbelief that he was to guys until he told me that he was gay as well and he always knew about me but he wanted me to say somethg. When Beg Gay Is ‘Not a Big Deal’Richie Jackson and Andrew Sullivan disagree about how central beg gay should be to one’s inty.
Kristoffer TripplaarEarlier this year, Andrew Sullivan, one of the earlit and most fluential tellectuals to advote for gay marriage, argued that “a gay polics was necsary only so that we uld eventually get beyond polics, and live as our straight brothers and sisters do, wh our sexual orientatn beg a nonissue our wir liv. ” He urged a posture of “jt gettg on wh our liv, whout our sexual orientatn gettg the way, ” llg that “the sant approach to beg gay, seeg as an tegral but by no means exhstive way of beg human. ”Those words me back to me this week as the producer Richie Jackson told the orig story of his forthg book, Gay Like Me, while beg terviewed at The Atlantic Ftival.
IS LNEL RICHIE GAY? THE TTH ABOUT THE SGER’S SEXUAL ORIENTATN
Richie Jackson and Andrew Sullivan disagree about how central beg gay should be to one’s inty. * richie skye gay *
He began wrg after his son me out as gay at age 15. “One of the reasons I wrote the book is that he thks beg gay is not a big al. “I thk beg gay is the bt thg about me.
”The approach to gay inty exemplify of a more general phenomenon: Every inty—of race, ethnicy, relign, genr, polil party, profsn, and beyond—enpass members who prefer a thick approach to that marker and others who prefer a thner, or th, approach.
That preference is plited whenever an inty is subject to Ameri moved on om s gay-rights moment—and left a legal ms behd“Some might say that this is progrs, ” Matt Thompson, the terviewer, said. “That the fact that beg gay is jt one dimensn of many inti your son uld claim––”Jackson cut him nnot be that we have fought back centuri of beg stigmatized by religns, that we have fought battle after battle wh our ernment, that we have disappoted our parents, all jt to get our liberatn so that we n say beg gay isn’t a big al. I don’t want to celebrate beg gay jt one day at the end of June every year.