ABSTRACT
This chapter defines sex, gender, and sexual orientation identity. It provides a historical backdrop of Black LGBT experience in the US The chapter includes an overview of some of the challenges that Black LGBT individuals and couples experience due to discrimination and those they face in coming out, dating, and navigating gender identity/roles. The 2015 landmark Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage was a victory for equal rights for LGBT people, making the US the twenty-first country in the global struggle to legalize same-sex marriage. Sexual orientation is the classification of individuals based on their emotional, cognitive, and sexual attraction to the opposite, both or the same sex or gender. African American LGBT people participated in the Homophile movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and some joined White-dominated LGBT organizations, like the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA), and formed affiliate groups with them.
