i have an strange tendency to assume that people i’ve met who i’m not physically or sexually attracted to are attracted to me, and this can be somewhat disconcerting. but, oddly, this feeling usually only applies to gay black men and ugly white women. you can imagine how difficult this makes shopping at the gap for me.
as weird as this bit of aggressively unambitious egomania might seem, i’ve reluctantly come to realize that it does make me somewhat homophobic. i mean, i’m not going to be joining T.O.K. to remix “chi-chi man” anytime soon, but the fact that i’d be a tad bit unnerved by a hooper x doppelganger showing me slacks means that i’m not quite the bastion of open-mindedness and objectivity i thought i was.
yet despite all of this, i take full advantage of the freedom my well-earned “well, he makes tongue-in-cheek jokes about everybody and everything. he’s really cool and compassionate though so don’t take it seriously” pretense gives me to make off-color jokes, asides, and analogies about homosexual men
anyway, thinking about all of this helps me to understand why so many “enlightened” sistas are loathe to admit that they’re just as (if not more) homophobic than the typical brotha is assumed to be.
because their homophobia usually isn’t as outwardly vehement as a cat reciting cam’ron lyrics or calling kanye a “faggot”, it’s somewhat easy for them to ignore the cognitive dissonance that occurs when professing the need for a “gay bff” while simultaneously using gay black men as an easy scapegoat for rising HIV infection rates. this thought process also leads them to dismiss the idea that a man telling his son to “stop being a sissy” and a woman refusing to date a man who they heard might have been a sissy in 1995 come from the exact same place.
plus, they realize that an educated person actually admitting that they still harbor a bit of uneasiness about the idea of a gay black man in 2010 blatantly contradicts the open-mindedness that most socially and politically savvy sistas pride themselves on, so they continue to join “i hate prop 8″ groups on facebook while opening another firefox window to order j.l. king’s most recent hysterical missive in bulk.
mind you, i’m not trying to start another round of the “more” race. i could care less about who’s “more” homophobic between us (a “typical” black man) and them (a “typical” black woman), and i could give two shits about who’s is going to reach the finish line first.
but, i will say that i know that we definitely aint alone on the track, even if they still won’t admit that they’ve been running too.
—the champ
With all the talk about Tiger and his inability to keep his cub in his pants, cheating has become front page news across the nation. Now, given his status in life, money, and the prevalence of cheating, I suppose we could reasonably expect that he would have strayed at some point and that his wife probably knew about it but just didn’t want to read about in the tabloids or she’d go all 9-Iron on his buttocks.