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Sex Roles (2013) 68:754767 DOI 10.1007/s11199-012-0152-4
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Once Youve Blended the Cake, You Cant Take the Parts Back to the Main Ingredients: Black Gay and Bisexual Mens Descriptions and Experiences of Intersectionality
Lisa Bowleg
Published online: 4 April 2012# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012
Abstract Although Black gay and bisexual men have written eloquently about the intersections of race, gender, and sexual identity in anthologies such as Brother to Brother and In the Life, empirical studies of intersectionality with men, and Black gay and bisexual men in particular are rare. This qualitative study examined descriptions and experiences of intersectionality in individual interviews with 12 U.S. Black self-identified gay (n09) and bisexual (n 03) men in Washington, DC. Participants ranged in age from 21 and 44 (M036.33) and were predominantly highly educated and middle income. Research questions were: (1) How do participants describe and experience intersections of race, gender, and sexual identity?; (2) How do social processes shape their social identities?; (3) What are their challenges due to intersections of race, gender, and sexual identity?; and (4) What are the perceived benefits of these intersections? Analyses highlighted four key themes: (1) explicit and implicit descriptions of intersectionality; (2) the primacy of identities as Black and/or Black men first; (3) challenges such as negative stereotypes, racial microaggressions in mainstream and White LGB communities, heterosexism in Black communities, and gender role pressures to act masculine; and (4) perceived benefits such as psychological growth, liberation from traditional gender role or heteronormative expectations, and the freedom that being outsiders or never being comfortable confers in terms of exploring new opportunities and experiences. These findings imply that intersectionality can be expanded to incorporate the
strengths/assets of intersectional identities in addition to oppression based on interlocking social identities.
Keywords Intersectionality. Black gay and bisexual men . Resilience . Racism . Social identity
Introduction
We must be willing to embrace and explore the duality of community that we exist in as Black and (italics in original) gay men, wrote Black gay cultural activist and poet Essex Hemphill in the introduction to the anthology Brother to Brother: Collected Writings by Black Gay Men (Hemphill 1991, p. xxvii). Without explicitly using the term intersectionality, Black gay and bisexual men have long written eloquently and...