ABSTRACT
Empowered by the compound racial-sexual identity that has been available since the early 1980s, metropolitan gay men of racial minority descent have, more effectively than ever (i.e. collectively instead of individually), articulated their discontents with the racism prevalent in a gay subculture that is predominantly white. But such a collective identity and the collectivities formed around it provide more than support in combating racism. Speaking of London’s Black Gay Group, Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien say: ‘That feeling of empowerment came from the collective identity we constructed for ourselves as black gay men, enabling us to overcome both the marginality we experienced as black people and the individual isolation we felt as gay people.’2 Richard Fung, based on the other side of the Atlantic, says:
In my own experience, the existence of a gay Asian community broke down the cultural schizophrenia in which I related on the one hand to a heterosexual family that affirmed my ethnic culture and, on the other, to a gay community that was predominantly white.3
