Gay and Race Cognizant: Interstitial Storytelling and the Narrative Positioning of an Interracial Gay Organization in the 1980s1

Abstract

In this article, I show how an interracial gay group forming in the 1980s, Black and White Men Together (BWMT), did storytelling of themselves as gay and anti‐racist. Part of a larger narrative ethnography, this article focuses on how BWMT, in a 1980s context compelling the question of interracial organizing, did storytelling to narratively construct themselves as such. This article notes how the group faced an immediate narrative environment likely to characterize an interracial gay group as either racial fetishists or colorblind interracialists and explains, through analysis of their newsletter, how they tried to create a larger story of themselves as neither. I detail the storytelling they did of themselves as gay and race cognizant—recognizing gay racial difference, confronting white gay power, and interrogating racist gay sex culture and racialized gay desire. I discuss how it operated as interstitial storytelling, drawing from and extending traditions of Black and gay liberation but with limits when deployed interracially in a colorblind context. I end by pointing out how their interstitial storytelling served to construct them as a legible intersectional movement organization and to narratively position them in relation to Black gay groups of the era.