Double Minority

This is a video/essay documenting what it is like to be both african-american and homosexual in modern day society. This was originally made as a piece of literature and holds a lot of truth, while some other points may be exaggerated. Nothing within this video is intentionally directed towards anyone. Although I have used my own photos, I have pulled experiences from a collective amount of my peers. I am grateful for any and everyone that I have in my life. The video serves to give the uneducated a general idea of what it is like to be a homosexual African-American. You can find the script below the video. This is still a work in progress but I feel passionate about the message and I have decided to take the time to share it with the world even though it is still in the first stages of revision. I want to thank all everyone for all of the support I have gotten! Make sure you pass it on!

        When I was a little boy my mother told me that in life I would have to work extra hard because I was a double minority. It wasn’t until I walked down the extensively crowded halls of my highly populated high school that I realized what she had meant. “Nigger”, I knew I was a nigger that was obvious from birth. I grew up around Niggers, light niggers, dark niggers, proper niggers, ghetto niggers. They taught us about niggers all throughout elementary school, well into middle, and even a little in high. Hell, they even had a month and national holiday for niggers. But “faggot”? Faggot was something else. Faggot was something that your childhood didn’t prepare you for. Faggot was the daddy that walked out on the mother before she could give birth to the child. The man that everyone hates by default and no one truly wants to talk about. The change that sits uncomfortably wedged deep within a family’s couch, hidden to the naked eye. It is an inevitable reality, a burden that many feel that they simply have to tolerate. That one exception to difference, because different is never right. Different isn’t the reason that the world has progressed into what it is today. Different is something that I have to deal with every day because science can’t explain the biology behind my sexual preference leaving the world with a reason to believe that it is completely my fault.

        I have heard that it is easy to be a double minority in America. That it is easy to be a colored sissy like me. That despite the shallowness cursed with being born homosexual, I can find a partner. Yes partnerbecause it isn’t moral for me to have a husband. I can find a partner that isn’t with me for my money, beauty, or reputation. A partner who genuinely loves me for who I am and is not going to leave me for the new cutie that emerges on the scene; even though homosexuals don’t want a man that is prettier than them and they are not to stay with anyone that they believe to be uglier. If I do get a man I wouldn’t have a clue as to keep him because my mother was too busy telling me about the birds and the bees when she should have been telling me about the birds and the birds and my father was too caught up in telling me to watch out for gold digging black women when he should have been telling me to look out for disease inflicted black men. For the double minority true love is like those fairy tales that are read to you before you go to sleep and the dream that you endlessly reminisce about when you wake up.

        Even with recognition of the veracity of a double minority’s unfortunate potential at a virtuous love life one can still not begin to emphasize.  Unfortunately, African-American parents don’t believe in fully supporting their children through college due to all the opportunities that Negros have available to them, and the aid that the government so graciously gives to students. My parents make too much for me to enjoy my aid but they’re still African-American. People ask, “Why are you so thin?” Well that is because I eat what I can afford and what I can afford is just enough to eat. I must endure the blonde haired Caucasians at my school while they try to decide between Olive Garden and Genghis Grill for dinner every other night, while I try to decide between Ramen Noodles or Hamburger Helper. No matter how many times I check it, my gas meter never sits above a quarter tank and my hair might get cut twice a month if I am lucky. Don’t feel sorry because I can always get a job right? Because racism is dead right? I mean, of course I have the same chance as any other applicant right? If the color of my skin didn’t inhibit my ability to get the job then my feminine temperament surely wouldn’t either right? Wrong. I should be able to find a job just as easily as anyone else, but when I did go to turn in my application to the establishment where I had over a years experience the only thing the employer told me was, “you are going to need a little more base in your voice if you are going to work here.” It isn’t socially acceptable for me to stand behind someone’s counter with a face painted in make-up and nails polished with a glossy clear coat. As if it is my fault when they say “Pull up to the first window ma’am” every time I pull up to a drive through. When I do conform to the public’s idea of what I should be, play dress up with G.I. Joes instead of Barbies, it still makes no difference because my sexual orientation is a stench I cannot get rid of no matter how hard I try to wash it off, no matter how much cologne I try to drown it in.

        When there are no jobs, when there is no money, when one has nowhere to go then we are taught to turn to our family. Well for the Double Minority this rule doesn’t always apply. There isn’t much support for colored punks because colored folks believe in a God that condemns sinful behavior and it is easy for one to disagree with anything that they can never associate with themselves. So adultery and thievery get a slap on the wrist while homosexuality gets beaten in the streets by those who fear it and sent up to it’s room by the politicians and teachers who don’t care to speak on it. Even when I do what they want me to do they are never satisfied because despite the fact that I am even in college, I am waiting my time because there are no successful black male writers and being gay doesn’t help either. “Boobie you should choose a profession in high demand!” My family urges me to pursue a profession where employers would have no choice but to hire me. “Be a doctor, a engineer, or a lawyer!” But that is what the world inspires to be. “No one goes on to be a somebody with a double major in wring in sociology!” Colored families always feel like you owe them something, “I birthed you into this world and I can take you out.”

        However, your family isn’t chosen and that is why God gave us friends. Friends who are supposed to be there to support you, but the heterosexual males are afraid of me and the girls secretly don’t like me. That only leaves me with my own kind to turn to who are vapid, jealous, and inconsiderate. As a double minority, your closest friends can tell you all the people you have had sex with and STDs you have contracted in your lifetime before they could tell you your favorite color or hobby. The phoniness so real that it is almost tangible. Showering each other in an infinite amount of “I love you's”, but actions speak louder than words and there cannot be truth without lies so a complex oxymoron is created where you are showered with love filled nothings. Nothings, because you never really meant anything to them in the first place. If that is not the truth then that is how it feels. It feels like faithfully believing in Santa Claus for ten years only to have your dreams crushed or thinking you’ve won a million dollars and then realizing you got the numbers wrong at your local 7 Eleven.

        Who needs friends like that right? Well the Double Minority does because no one else understands it, no one else tolerates it. This is the reason for pallets laid out in vacant living rooms, packed out clubs on weekdays, and mothers that never get to see their child walk across the stage at graduation. This is the reason that hopes and dreams are relinquished for wigs and make-up. It is the reason for children taken from their homes and sucked into a world with no recognition. A world where one believes that they have to be a somebody in a population filled with nobodies. So brainwashed that when you try to lift a finger to point them away from the drugs, sex, and partying they call you envious and miserable. So entangled within a negative sense of self-worth that they are unaware of the false truths that they perpetuate. False truths that aren’t so false because all stereotypes have a bit of truth to them. I mean all homosexuals eventually die of HIV right? Yes, because they are all promiscuous and incapable of maintaining monogamous relationships. Make sure you watch that faggot while he is shopping in your store! Read the check that he has given you carefully! Don’t be scared to ask him about what you have on because he has to be fashionable! Invite him to hang out with you because he is sure to provide all the amusement! We allow society to make a mockery out of us by living into negative standards that we set up ourselves.

        Through it all I still have my writing but my peers, they are my greatest critics, they seem to think that I am a one-trick pony, “Why does everything you write about have to be about gay issues?” I will stop writing about “gay issues” when there are no “gay issues” to write about. When I can twist freely down the street without attracting odd stares, when I can call of my wedding right before I make it to the alter on a hot afternoon in Florida, when a girl can tell me how “adorable” I am without having to turn to her friend afterwards to say that I really look a mess, when I don’t have to tell the next generation that “It gets better” because it already is better.

        If life is like a box of chocolates then the Double Minority is the group of that gets the piece that is unexpectedly dissatisfying, the piece that one regrets choosing in the first place but knows that they cannot change the fact that they have already swallowed it. Some nights all I can do is look at the hand I was dealt and cry hoping that I was born 500 years ago when this problem wasn’t relevant or 500 years later when it hopefully will no longer be an issue.