How I finally looked past the bullying and fear in my own story and saw my duty to support LGBT people of color.
BY TIM MURPHY
Recently I’ve come to realize that, as vulnerable as I’ve felt all my life as a gay person, I’ve had it pretty good as a white, cisgender man. The daily thrum of videos showing unarmed black people being harassed, beaten or even killed by police is getting to me, along with the murder epidemic of transgender women of color.
It has taken me some time to come to this realization. I’ve lived much of my life as an outsider. As a child in the 1980s, I was severely bullied in my Massachusetts hometown, even before I knew my sexual orientation. And when I came out of the closet and moved to New York City in the early 1990s, the shadow of AIDS and the threat of anti-gay violence loomed large. The best we gays could hope for, I felt, was to huddle together and be content with our designated gyms, bars and community groups. The larger world was not for us.
A lot has changed in the past 25 years. As a movement, we won the right to serve openly in the military, get married and enjoy legal protections from discrimination in work, housing and family matters. For me, a gay white man living in the bubble of 2016 New York City, it often feels like “everything is alright now.”
For most of my life, it didn’t occur to me that racial injustice might be an LGBT issue. Friends and fellow activists have on occasion asked me to “confront my gay white male privilege.” What privilege? I wanted to rebut. The privilege of growing up bullied and shunned? Of living in terror of AIDS? Of constantly looking over my shoulder for gaybashers? Of hearing constantly from homophobic religious people that I was sick?
But then about 15 years ago, I attended a community meeting on the criminalization and targeting of drug users by New York City cops. Afterwards, I told a (white) friend I’d sat alongside: “Gee, I had run-ins with the cops when I was using drugs and they were always perfectly nice to me.”
“Maybe that’s because they saw you as a nice white boy,” he replied.
That was a wake-up call for me. I’d long assumed it was my own grit that got me through my tough gay childhood. But maybe, I now realized, I’d been buoyed by privilege and opportunities that my own (legitimate) sense of gay injury had blinded me from seeing.
And as much as I suffered in earlier years for being gay, I’ve never suffered because of my race or sex. I have never feared that a cop might take my life before I reached my destination. Or feared even leaving my home.
Several years ago, in an interview with transgender icon Laverne Cox, she told me that she felt unsafe the moment she left her New York City apartment and didn’t feel safe again until she returned. She’d been regularly insulted on the street, even kicked once.
This growing consciousness about the privilege I do have has helped me get over that sense of injury about my own past and see more clearly what is going on right now among LGBT people of color. Admitting I was far better off than I thought I was, merely by dint of my race and gender, also alerted me to what I consider my responsibilities.
I credit this recent barrage of police violence at least partly for my decision to participate in the new group Gays Against Guns. Certainly the news has fortified my determination to support the transgender rights movement and the many brave queer people in the Black Lives Matter movement, now more than ever.
Tim Murphy‘s novel “Christodora,” a saga of the AIDS epidemic in 1980s-90s New York City, came out in August. He also writes for New York magazine.