HomoQuotable – Steve Freiss

“White gay men as a group could be the truest friends black women can
have in American society. No alliance is perfect, but this one has the
potential, if nurtured properly, to reconfigure the stories of race and
gender. White gay men — once intensely vilified but now able to harness
our white male privilege for good, having learned what being on the
outside is like — are a conduit through which black women can work
against both countervailing forces that push them down. [snip]

“The mutual fondness between so many black women and white gay men
arises both from similar, if not shared, experience, but also a
strikingly similar approach to coping with it. Some tropes emerged from
black female culture and some from the gay world, but how or why is the
stuff not of pundits or essayists, but of doctoral dissertations by
social anthropologists. We aren’t going to get to the bottom of that on
Twitter.

“Still, cultural alliances like this are rare and should be treasured,
not chastised. Black men didn’t have one. Neither did Jews or Native
Americans. Arab Americans sure don’t. But through some fluke of cosmic
association, black women have kindred spirits in white gay men. Don’t
push us away.” – Steve Freiss, in a TIME Magazine response to the now famous “Dear White Gays” rant.