My Open Letter to White Gay Men With Racial Preferences…Five Years Later

Five years ago, I wrote a piece for HuffPost calling out racist dating preferences among queer white men. This is the response I got, and how my mind has changed since.

I think it’s safe to say, five years ago white liberals were in a different headspace. It was year one of Trump’s presidency and suddenly many of them were reexamining what they thought they knew about the country they lived in, specifically its views on race. The collective shock of Trump’s ascension to the oval office sparked a sort of national self-reflection amongst white liberals that hadn’t been seen since the civil rights era, and wouldn’t be seen again until the death of George Floyd. It was this environment that sparked a flurry of think pieces from white journalists, and commentators openly questioning how racist their neighbors were, their family was, and how racist they were.

It was also this environment in which my friend and I, inspired by the amazing indie film, Tangerine, decided to produce a very low-budget film of our own. Like Tangerine, we wanted it to center around queer people of color but unlike Tangerine, we wanted it to hit racism within the gay community head-on.

On a side note: I will be using the phrase “gay community” quite a bit but its more for lack of a better term for: all men who fuck men. I personally have never felt “in community” with any group of white men, gay or not.

I mined my own experiences with racism, and the experiences of friends, to come up with the story, and the end result was called No Chocolate, No Rice. The script centered on the friendship between two best friends — one Asian, the other Black, both gay — confronting casual racism in the queer community. We launched a Kickstarter to fund the project, and to gin up interest — and raise money — I decided to write a piece about racism in the gay male population and shop it around various outlets.

See, by this point that white liberal self reflection train that I mentioned earlier had made it into queer station. Everywhere you looked there were articles examining racism in the gay community, as if it had just sprouted up out of nowhere. It seemed like white gays were finally asking themselves the hard questions like: Is there racism in the gay community?

To be frank, I was a bit annoyed with the tone of the discourse surrounding the subject of racist gays at the time, it was giving racism 101, racism for dummies. So, I decided to pen a piece that would cut the bullshit and say to white gays what I thought needed to be said. An Open Letter To Gay, White Men: No, You’re Not Allowed To Have A Racial Preference was published on HuffPost, June 19th 2017 and the response was…interesting.

Now, I’m not sure the term “viral” is applicable here; the original tweet for the piece from @huffpostqueer had less than a couple of hundred likes. I mean, my piece didn’t trend or anything, and I didn’t have a personal twitter so I wouldn’t have known even if it had. However, BuzzFeed’s post highlighting Ira Madison III’s joke tweet in reaction to it had thousands of responses, and basically every gay man I knew had sent me the link to it. There were reaction articles and a Reddit thread.

What I’m attempting to highlight is that the piece got shared in more ways than one, and became a widespread topic of conversation among the online gays for at least a few hours. As for that interesting response I mentioned, it could’ve been the edge lord title I came up with or the subject matter itself but the “community” definitely had thoughts, the vast majority of which were boring and predictable. There were the usual ignorant comments from angry people unable to form a coherent argument, the intellectually dishonest comments from low-key racists defending their racism, and my favorite, the high-key racist comments from racists defending their racism.

Then there were the comments — not unlike Ira’s — from fellow Black gays who viewed my piece as a Thandiwe Newton-esque, light-skinned/oreo revelation that I was actually black after having faced some sort of racial prejudice. This is the only sort of response that kinda bothered me because even though my light skin didn’t protect me from being stopped by police in SE DC while growing up, I’ve always been fully aware of my privilege when juxtaposed to my brown and dark-skinned friends and family. I also felt those attacks were more attacking the messenger than grappling with the message, although it’s totally understandable. Black folks have kneejerkly turned inward to our own for centuries in the face of racism from wytes, so much so that when any Black person complains about racism from wyte people the attitude from the collective is more so “what did you expect” than “yea you right.”

So, just months away from the 5th anniversary of the piece, I decided to re-read it and see if any of my thoughts had evolved since 2017. I’ll be responding to my essay in bits from here on, so if you want to read the entire thing or you just have a fetish for generating ad revenue for Huffpost, you may do so here.

Let’s get started.

Dear Gay White Men,

Before I begin, I want you to understand that I’m not calling all of you racist. I’ve never been one to throw that word around casually and even though I’m sure there are some that word would fit like a glove, I’m not talking to them. I’m talking to you ― the cisgendered, white, gay men out there who hold no ill will towards minorities (especially black and brown ones) but somehow have never found themselves in bed with one.

So my use of the term “minority” is a bit less palatable to me today than it was five years ago. I wouldn’t use it this way again. I just feel like if you want to say Black, say Black. If you want to say Asian, say Asian. I don’t like lumping a ton of people with vastly different experiences together, even when we all face similar struggles with the racist hierarchy in the west. Also, this read of the situation ignores the fetishization of Black and Brown folks but I know I touch on that a bit later in the piece. I also capitalize Black now when referring to people in print.

You’re good guys, I know this to be true.

I actually don’t know this to be true. I think I was just trying not to be hated by wyte folks. I care much less now.

You mean well when it comes to race relations but, as a white man in… the world, you must admit, you have no clue what it means to be racially discriminated against. As a result, there are often times when you don’t recognize when your behavior towards people of color veers into problematic territory.

So while I think some white folks (BTW, if you’re confused when I use the term wyte in place of white, just click here for clarification) may not be aware of the ways in which they sometimes weaponize race, I believe all wyte folks do. Also, excusing the impact of someone’s racism because they’ve never experienced it themselves is…come on, Donovan.

Let’s start with the epicenter of your problematic behaviors towards my kind: your dating app profile. I know it can be hard to find the right words while expressing your preferences when it comes to what you’re looking for in a partner. Whether you’re looking for “Mr. Right” or “Mr. Yea Daddy Right There” but I can’t help but notice that a lot of you get lost, like… really lost, when it comes to stating your preferences properly. To be clear, you’re allowed to describe the kind of guy you’re looking for and the things that turn you on but specifying the race of your desired partner is a line that is not to be crossed. It comes off as racist and that’s because it is.

I think that racial prejudices in dating are the last remaining, socially acceptable presentation of racism. What I’ve come to understand in the last five years is that the wyte gays who proudly exclaim their racial prejudices realize this too. In this piece I was making the assumption that they were in some way unaware of the impact of their statements. BTW, I’m not saying every white person who prefers dating within their race is a racist but those publicly proclaiming that all their sexual and romantic partners need to be white are sending a message to POC as well.

But what if Black and Asian men choose to only date other Black and Asian men? Isn’t that racist too? No… and you tried it. Look, all men are created equal but all men are not valued equally, especially in this country. Every Black and Asian man who grew up on this planet grew up surrounded by positive images of whiteness and white men. Therefore, our desire to date within our own race, when we choose to, is not rooted in any assertion made by society that we’re better than anyone else…

Here, I did want to unpack POC choosing to stay within their race a bit more. I think I hesitated to expand on this five years ago because espousing the virtues of dating outside of your race, as a Black man, just felt uneasy to me at the time. I also don’t want to speak on the Asian experience — and probably shouldn’t have done so quite as much as I did — since it’s not one that belongs to me.

In another well-circulated piece I wrote for HuffPost, Race Play 101: My Introduction Into The World Of Racist Sex Play, I mentioned an encounter I had with a wyte man during sex when he called me a nigger. What I did not mention was that we were actively dating (he was literally the first white guy I ever dated) and post that encounter I swore off seeing white men for a time. During that period, I came to understand just how limiting it is to have racial requirements while dating, but I still understand why so many Black folks consider dating a white person just a step too far for them. Spoiler alert: Its to avoid shit like what I wrote a whole damn article on. Look, Black love is beautiful. Interracial love is beautiful. All love is indeed beautiful, but it all also exists within a society built on racism.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you have to find all Black and Asian men attractive. I sure as hell don’t. What I’m saying is that men of color are still men, and as such, we want the people making decisions about our desirability to make them based on who and what we are and that doesn’t begin and end with a few layers of melanin.

This is the closest I’ll come to outright saying I was wrong on something in this piece, but it’s not because I was wrong, I just don’t give a shit. I’m not sure I ever did give a shit. Here, I believe I was recounting emotions based on feelings I didn’t personally have. Like I said, I sat with a lot of friends about their experiences dating wyte gays for my movie and I came up with a few talking points about sexual racism that while sincere, were not sincerely my own views. I could give a shit why some random wyte gays make the decisions they do on who they screw. What I do care about is actions, and upholding systems of racism shrouded as “romantic racial preferences.”

As you know, the brain is the largest sexual organ in your body and it’s capable of amazing growth. Think of it like learning a new language, better still, think of it like unlearning a racist one. In social psychology there is a theory called The Mere-Exposure Effect. Simply put, the more we are exposed to someone, the more attractive they become to us.

So, while the mere-exposure effect is a real thing, I think my platforming of it in this piece was ultimately kind of useless because one of the reasons a lot of wytes have racist dating habits is because they don’t really know any people of color to begin with. An infamous poll released in 2014 concluded three-quarters of white people don’t have any Black friends. Other polls have the number closer to forty percent. Look, I think we all know people lie so my estimates put that the number closer to ninety-nine percent (just kidding, sorta.) White people, in general, just aren’t very engaged when it comes to discussions of race — and I’ve come to realize, that’s on purpose. Also, the mere-exposure effect, applied practically, is basically just an excuse for gentrification and we can’t have that.

All in all, I don’t think my views on the sexual racism of wyte gays has changed very much in the five years since I wrote my piece. Although I must admit, seeing things like “no Blacks, no Asians” on a Grindr profile is far less common in 2022 than it was in 2017. I’m sure Grindr themselves would love to take some credit for that. Have any of those gays who’ve learned not to post their racial prejudices online actually taken steps to interrogate their own bias? Probably not. But I think if my piece had any real value in terms of moving things forward, it was in being one of the many that called out the casual racism we saw in the gay community and forcing a modicum of shame onto those who perpetrated it.