Melvin Dixon

In one of my classes this week we will be reading selections by the late Melvin Dixon, a gay and African American poet-scholar who died during the nineties. In one of his essays, “I’ll Be Listening for My Name,” he touches upon the kind of doubled death lgbt artists face in the AIDS crisis, as they face racial discrimination in the public sphere that is compounded by the denial of their emotional and sexual lives by families and communities who refuse to recognize gays and lesbians. We have also been reading Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, which is about a teenage boy who is the chosen one, smart and athletic. Also gay, he eventually dies under the burden of homophobia, of being forced to see himself as simultaneously chosen and damned, angel and demon.

Well, this morning I was greeted by a story on crimes against the LGBT community in Newark, NJ, “In a Progressive State, a City Where Gay Life Hangs by a Thread.” The story is by Andrew Jacobs, who’s on the Newark beat at the NYT. It’s not a terrible story, and it does a nice job of outlining a broad picture of options for the lgbt community in lower and working class communities of color in Newark.

The story got me thinking, though, about how difficult it is to talk about sex and race– especially when we barely have language for sussing out race and class. So what happens when, as in most cases, we need to talk about all three at once? Often, it seems, we latch onto the one that best serves our own needs, a need fed by our perceptions “what counts” and “what matters.” But, again, what does this mean for the possibility of
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