Double jeopardy: Building strong communities to fight homopobia and racism

CrossCurrents

by Andrea Zoe Aster

Frank Brawn is gay.  He knew that by age six. Now, more than five decades later, and married with children, he’s certain about one more thing – he will never come out as a gay man, not to his wife and grown children, and certainly not to the Eastern European Muslim community,within which he is a prominent figure. And though it’s a source of crushing anguish, Brawn (a pseudonym he uses) knows he will never act, even secretly, upon his desire.

“I’ve had opportunities to have a gay relationship, but I’ve always managed not to,” says Brawn, who suffers from debilitating depression and is seeing a psychologist for the first time. “Perhaps instead, I will write a memoir to be published after my death. It will be helpful for the medical community to have insight into the torment I go through.”

Brawn’s story is stark, and sadly, it’s not unique. Being homosexual in a heterosexual world is difficult enough. But it’s even harder for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) people from minority ethnic communities. For them, the key challenge is dodging a double edged sword of systemic homophobia and racism – racism that may even exist within the LGBT community itself, which is largely white and middle class. Unfortunately, advocates agree, it’s a myth that racial tolerance flows more easily within the LGBT community.

What’s more, while many members of the LGBT community risk estrangement from family when coming out, white people find alternative havens more readily. In Toronto, to feel a sense of instant community, any university-aged white male can simply take a short stroll down Toronto’s Church Street on a Saturday night.

“If a white person is kicked out of their family, they still have a connection with a Canada that reflects who they are; they don’t lose connection with their identity,” says Silvana Bazet, a Toronto-based psychotherapist in private practice who works with many LGBT people of colour including those in South Asian and Latin American communities.

But what if you’re, say, a Nigerian lesbian? For many minority LGBTs, the stakes are higher if they lose family support, says Bazet. Not only is there racism within the queer community; but also, tight-knit minority communities offer a collective buffer against societal racism, and that’s not something to be traded away lightly.

That buffer is especially precious within Canada’s African community, says Notisha Massaquoi, a member of the Toronto-based social forum Gays and Lesbians of African Descent, and program director of Women’s Health in Women’s Hands, a community health network in Toronto.

“Preserving a sense of community can be a much stronger impulse than the individual desire to be out,” says Massaquoi. “That need to preserve your family is especially amplified in Canadian communities. Sometimes, all you have here is a small group of Nigerians, and it’s not worth it for many LGBTs to alienate them, especially if they have no other family here.” In fact, so critical is this insight that Massoquoi cautions health care professionals to avoid encouraging minority LGBTs, especially Africans, to come out, even if that seems contrary to conventional practice.

“As mental health professionals, we’re taught to look at the mental anguish caused by staying silent about sexual orientation,” says Massoquoi. “The goal, always, is to get to the point of disclosure, working with clients to tell their family, and if they’re rejected, working to find support elsewhere. But to understand African clients, you can’t push them because you can’t provide them with the support they need. You’re asking them to risk the loss of their family, but what are you going to replace it with?”

Indeed, that insight hits home for many minority communities. Brawn, for example, has made a few timid trips to meetings with Salaam Toronto, a community network for queer Muslims. But after only five meetings, he decided Salaam couldn’t become a satisfactory replacement for his own community. He has found it difficult to find other, older gay Muslims with whom to connect.

“It s not common for Muslim men over 45 to come out,” says Brawn. Religious pressures are simply too constricting. “Homosexuality is strictly prohibited by the Koran.You go to hell if you’re gay. It’s that kind of interpretation.”

Bleak as that may be, many experts are quick to defend minority communities against at least one rampant stereotype – that ethnic minority communities are more homophobic, says Stacia Stewart, diversity co-ordinator for Ottawa-based EGALE, a support group for under-represented gays and lesbians.

Indeed, especially in the African-American lesbian community, it’s common that a family’s loyalty often prevents alienation, not the opposite, as is the stereotype, according to a 2003 study by Sara Bridges and colleagues in the Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development. “The misperception that African communities are more homophobic results from this mainstream push to construct them as primitive,” says Massaquoi.

Bazet agrees. “I often hear more horrifying stories coming out of white communities.” But some minority families of LGBTs generate their own myths. If their child does come out, “the easiest thing for them to do is blame this decadent western culture,” says Bazet. “They say ‘We never should have come here,’ as if LGBTs didn’t exist in our home countries. For example, in Latin America, LGBT communities have been organizing since the 1960s.”

Part of this misunderstanding comes from the fact that in many ethnic minority communities, sex isn’t discussed openly with parents, even if you’re heterosexual, says Massaquoi. “That discussion hasn’t happened, so a person may not consider themselves officially ‘out’ in the western sense. Many minority communities don’t have labels for same-sex behaviour. If you’d ask certain [women of colour] if they’re lesbian, they might say no because they believe lesbians act and look a certain way within a western context, and they don’t match up.”

Faced with an extraordinary raft of pressures, from both within and outside their communities, what are minority LGBTs doing to cope?

“It’s especially important for minorities to see themselves reflected in public spaces,” says Massaquoi. “And if you have the privilege of being out, it’s important to be vocal. There’s a lot of mystery surrounding the African gay community. The whole mainstream doesn’t know it exists.”

There are also an increasingly diverse number of organizations (see sidebar) for minority LGBTs, offering both online and community support. For example, Rauda Morcos is making pioneering efforts as the voice for Palestinian lesbians in Israel. As co-founder of Haifabased Aswat, she was recently in Toronto as part of a North American fundraising tour. The group’s efforts include an online chat room and political-education material for communities. The group also holds regular meetings where members face the challenge of forging a new vocabulary to describe LGBT identity. This is a challenge for many minorities. There is no word for “lesbian” in most Asian languages, says Bridges’ study.

“The first time I said the word ‘lesbian,’ I had to use English because there is no word in Arabic,” says Morcos. “In a society that doesn’t allow questioning of sexual identity, we had no model to refer to.”

Outside the minority LGBT community, health care professionals need to become more sensitive to the unique concerns of this population. Doctor and Bazet are taking a step in this direction by offering what may be the only workshop in Canada to train professionals who work with lesbian and bisexual women of colour.

Though minority LGBTs face challenges, some of which are more easily overcome than others, most agree that visibility and joint efforts among non-mainstream communities are a vital coping strategy. “We’re increasingly seeing queer people of colour getting together to face common challenges,” says Stewart at EGALE. “It’s not impossible to find and build community.”

For more information about “Un/divided Loyalties,” Farzana Doctor and Silvana Bazet’s Toronto-based workshop for counselling lesbian and bisexual women of colour, contact Bazet at 416 535-5705 or via e-mail at silvanabazet@sympatico.ca.

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