Gay white men
White LGBT Adults in the US
- White LGBT adults are more likely to hire in high-risk health behaviors than Pale non-LGBT adults. Among White LGBT adults, 27% report current smoking and 9% report heavy drinking, compared to 18% and 7% of non-LGBT adults, respectively.
- More White LGBT adults than non-LGBT adults report having mild or high disability, defined by the number of days that they experienced limitations due to poor health in the prior month. Among White adults, 28% reported experiencing mild disability, defined as experiencing limitations because of penniless health for 1-14 days in the past month; 12% reported high disability, defined as experiencing limitations because of poor health for 15-30 days in the past month. By comparison, 20% of White non-LGBT adults reported mild disability, and 10% reported high disability.
- Compared to White non-LGBT adults, White LGBT adults had greater odds of existence diagnosed with several serious health conditions, including asthma, diabetes, heart attack, cancer, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. These disparities subsist for both Pale LGBT men and women compared to non-LGBT men and women, with the exception of cancer for White w
“Do I really need to describe to you the difference between throwing shade and reading someone? Girl, do I need to teach you gay history?”
So was a real conversation I had with a seemingly real person sitting across the table from me. He was a colorless gay man, a flamboyant personal trainer who lived in Novel York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, the same kind who has a liking to utilizing the term “YASSSS KWEEN” with every other sentence; the same who is content only having white top friends to take shirtless selfies with on Fire Island; the same who says he exclusively dates blonde hair and blue-eyed men. But the same who says they’re not racist because they once “dated an Indian.”
I allowed this man to persist whitesplaining to me, an Asian American, and my African American best friend sitting next to him, on the off chance that maybe, just maybe, we’d actually learn something. Like, please, white man, I beseech you to enlighten me.
SEE ALSO: It’s time we start telling Asian American gay stories
“It’s from Paris is Burning, you know, the documentary about the original performative queens,” he whitesplained. “The kingly queens are the ones who explain throwing shade and reading som
Malherbe ’26: Do we really need more stories about colorless gay men?
Growing up in a cute conservative and homophobic environment, it took me a while to come out. In the day before I could embrace my culture and find my community, I recall queer representation in media being super important for me. I would meal up anything with even a minute LGBTQ+ subtext, whether that be a show as explicitly queer as “RuPaul’s Drag Race” or a film that at least had a gay person in it, love “Mean Girls.” The pickings were a little basic, for sure; I couldn’t be expected to have the flavor of RISD’s artsiest film student as a preteen. To a young, uninformed me, these forms of media gave me an understanding into the gay culture I wanted to be a part of so badly. Unfortunately, I quickly found that this representation — which I hoped would feature the entire culture and community — was close exclusively focused on cisgender white queer men. Though this was an issue in my childhood, I had hoped it would be mostly solved by the time I had grown up. I was a bit too optimistic.
According to a GLAAD report on Gay representation in clip this past year, most queer characters featured were light, most
The Privilege of Being a Gay White Male
Let me start by saying that writing this article was tough. It felt awkward. Indeed, the topic of alabaster gay male privilege in the HIV community is seldom written about from the inside. In proof the term “white queer male” (or GWM) more often appears as an epithet, a term not of endearment or of inclusion but the reverse. Understand I’m not complaining about that. Instead I’m asking how do colorless gay men like myself, particularly if we are lucky enough to hold avoided most but not all of the barriers to living happily and healthily, best navigate HIV work when so many in our community are not white, not same-sex attracted and definitely not privileged?
It gets complicated fairly swiftly. Intersectionality, the buzzword of the decade, has opened up discussions of what being marginalized really means. It starts, some activists say, with asking, “What kinds of privileges some LGBTQ community members include and who gets denied them.” Apply that to who gets to proceed to conferences, who are our spokespeople, who most often head our organizations, who are our decision-makers. I’ll wager, in reality I know, that colorless gay men are