West Hollywood Is Not That Big on Anything but White People: Constructing “Gay Men of Color”

ABSTRACTRather than a defined endpoint that is waiting to be discovered or developed, racial and sexual identities can be considered social identities that are fluid, malleable, and socially created through a social process that defines what it means to be a member of a social group. This article expands the work on how social identities are constructed, by examining personal anecdotes used by gay men of color to discuss how they come to see themselves as “gay men of color.” In doing so, we find that gay men of color use a number of cultural tropes that provide them the framework necessary to structure their experiences within a larger social context of a largely white, heterosexual society. Drawing on these cultural tropes, gay men of color create a social identity that is simultaneously raced and sexed through the use of shared cultural tropes that define what it means to be a member of this group.