Kyle Phoenix Answers: What does "SGL" Same Gender Loving mean for people of color (African American, Latino, Caribbean, etc.) in regards to sexuality?

An SGL Identity

Now that we’ve established what we are and how we perceive ourselves and reality from a cultural and racial point of view. And have moved through the view of our own sexuality as existent, as divergent from absolute heterosexuality, but not excluding it, we can look at the confluence of the two with a third element: the emotional-spiritual-cultural nomination of the Self.

Same Gender Loving is a description for homosexuals and bisexuals, particularly in the African American and Latino community. It emerged in the early 1970s as a [Black] culturally affirming homosexual identity. SGL is an alternative to Eurocentric homosexual identities e.g. gay and lesbian which do not culturally affirm or engage the history and cultures of people of African descent. Specifically, the term SGL affirms Black homosexual and bisexual men and women through its African American conceptual origins, African inspired iconography, philosophy, symbols, principles, and values. The term SGL usually has broad, important and positive personal, social, and political purposes and consequences. SGL is anti-hate and anti-anti-Black.

In a 2004 study of African American men, most of whom were recruited from black gay organizations, 12% identified as same gender loving, while 53% identified as gay. Men attending Black Gay Pride Festivals in nine U.S. cities in 2000 responded similarly, with 10% identifying as same gender loving, 66% as gay, and 14% as bisexual. Because of selection bias the results of the studies are unsurprising. Recent studies indicate that African-American disadvantaged youths are less likely than Euro-American youths to self-label as gay male, lesbian, or transgender youths. While these studies exhibit an expected outcome, that is, going to an organization or event that is labeled and marketed as gay would yield a high correlation between participants and a gay identity such studies also illustrate the need for increased study and location of the organizations and activities that cater to same gender loving people.

It was reported, for instance, that in 1990 and 2000 the Census allowed same-sex cohabiting couples to identify themselves as "unmarried partners." It is likely that many of the individuals in these same-sex couples would identify as "gay," "lesbian," and/or "same gender loving.

By nominating ourselves, by determining our own racial self-perception, our own self-perceived sexuality, no matter how and why it might change and grow, we move away from a White ontology of quantification of our selves. It might at first seem idiosyncratic or even extremely radical but it is both historical, the Kunte Kinte of ourselves, and radically progressive to self-determine how one is nominated. The reason why I tool such labored pains to point out the connection between people of the African Diaspora and indigenous peoples is so that we can connect to that historically, not simply default to that which the dominant culture presents to us. And we can do something even more radical: acknowledge the imposition and subjugation upon us and our sexuality by the dominant culture. We can acknowledge that there was a span of hundreds of years within a Western framework where people of color, whether Native, African or Latino, were allowed to self-determine and nominate their sexuality. Our bodies, ourselves, our expressions of ourselves was co-opted and controlled. Doesn’t it then make sense that we moved in lockstep with White homosexuals in definition of a divergent sexuality from heterosexuality, without regards to if that new definition fit us emotionally, culturally, spiritually as well.

I, of course, recognize that this Special Report has been filled with some of the information and ways of interpreting information that I initially derided. I do this intentionally.

• One, to establish a framework of language and understanding between me, you and the materials themselves.

• And secondly, as a way of giving you a springboard to launch yourself into your own direction of self-definition.

If your definitions are general (and dominant culture imposed at that) you can in no way disavow them and consider the voice within you, the experience of your own self as the definer of your human experience. Use the previous information not to reinforce your acceptance of an overly simplistic and culturally nullifying nomination, but instead to trigger your inherent, ancestral radicalism to re-nominate yourself.

As a man of color, you’re going up against your family of origin, your community, perhaps even your own inner thoughts to try and forge a life as an MSM. The effort to reconcile your sexuality, your desire for intimacy, mating and love against the society at large, is tremendous. Coupled with the fact that as a man of color there are inordinate pressures upon your psyche, your life about your very existence. About whether your intelligence is “true” or real; about whether your intentions are pure and trustworthy; about whether your very existence is valuable. Converging the two elements of your life together creates an incredible weight within MSM of color. Nowhere in history is there a space of reflection, of lesson to look upon to see how MSM of color dealt with these multiple burdens from the society around them. Yet we can forge a new paradigm for handling these elements of pressure. First though we must start by self0defining ourselves. By speaking our truth to power, by recognizing that we possess the intrinsic right to connect and be seen as we desire.

That’s monumental.

The strategies and historical elements useful for such work, more than we can tackle in this Special Report, are now available in the 21st century for us to bandy about, for us to examine, for us to analyze and hold that which serves and leave that which doesn’t.. But I invite you to take the first step, to simply think and speak of yourself differently. To try it out. To decide for yourself what such a definition would look like for you. Not through the words or edict of any leaders, gay or SGL defined, but through your own template of identity. Manhood is about accountability, responsibility and integrity---I challenge you to apply all three portions to this task. In accountability to yourself, what embodies and supports not simply your sexual classification but also you racial one? In responsibility, what do you then do with your newfound definition for yourself and your community? And finally, in integrity, your own forged steel and iron within, how do you articulate it outwards into your relationships with other men, in a loving fashion?

To identify as SGL is not simply a testament of one’s sexuality, it is also the integration of our own cultural self-perceptions and a rejection of simple binary definitions and epistemologies of sexuality. Take some time and define your individual self and sexuality, you’ll be more the better and empowered for doing so!

Ashe.

Smile, Kyle
KylePhoenixShow@Gmail.com

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Kyle Phoenix Answers: Why are Latino/Black men, on an average, more Alpha than their White counterparts?

Socially we are engendered to be more aggressive one and two white folk by socialization have been engendered to fear us. Whether low grade anxiety or high end paranoia, white have spent more time, energy and attention terrified we gonna come get them. What do you think a big Mexican border wall is about----racial fear. Travel bans. Root? Race fear of us going rogue terrorist.

We are one, majority and two more integrated in white cultures than vice versa. This has occurred to exploit workers and skills but at the same time has created deep vulnerability. Whether it's cities or plantations all white people become aware that it is merely negative self esteem and disinterest that prevent non whites from just wholesale taking over. Wed rather let you run everything, stress over it and just create parity.

:). Race war won, hindsight will show.

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Jonathan Washington

Feb 25, 2017 · 1 upvote

Bruh in all honesty we are not the “alpha” males. We don't control the money, media, or any nuclear weapons. This isn't the stone age anymore, being the alpha isn't about “physical” or being tough. Who signs the checks for athletes, or runs the entertainment industry. Being the alpha male is much more than having the long dick.

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Kyle Phoenix

Feb 26, 2017

We are sexualized as more potent, we are cast as more physically dangerous, we are seen as more aggressive, we are media spotlighted as more prone to violence, we are consigned as better dancers and athletes. The measurement of biological alphaness is based on the above traits. We also control resources and are integrated all throughout white society from servants to secretaries of state. What we lack, partially due to racism and partially due to lack of numbers within western countries. A billion really black folk sit in Africa but less than 50 million in USA with a population of 350 million, yet we still have triumphed, surpassed, survived there is inherent alphaness in the above negative racial assertions and in our very existence.

But we've been Plymouth rocked with low self esteem en masse. We immediately know the increasingly narrow places we ain't. Obama, Powell, Rice...twice had influence over nuclear and military options; there have been multiple billionaires since the nineties, astronauts, generals in active wars, there are thousands of businesses throughout every industry from tech to service to auto to biotech owned and operated by blacks, the problem is that we are divided d sharply in educated, formal or not, and non educated therefore by our population numbers we haven't attained parity.

But from Jackson to Poitier to Smith to Obama to Woods in a relatively short span of time, less than seventy years we've asserted a profound superiority to excel. The problem isour competition is simply bigger and not all of us are on the field. But those of us who are, perhaps even the misguided and misconstrued, are Alphas.

Don't fight triumph. It is a Black planet, its just not publicized in America and Europe.

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Jonathan Washington: Perhaps your right. Thank you

Smile, Kyle
KylePhoenixShow@Gmail.com

The Kyle Phoenix Show 

 LIVE STREAMING on MNN.org 1130pm, Spectrum Cable Manhattan, NY 

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Keep Calm, It's Just Melanin, Part 1 by Kyle Phoenix

                 I’ve written a lot about race.  Examining it and sexuality as two sides of an identity coin as I try to make sense of two categorizations that to the audience say everything about a person but to that person, the subject, reveal very little.  I live and work on the island of Manhattan, moving through millions of people every day who fall into such myriadical categories that I have a hard time sometimes discerning what language, much less dialect of that language is occurring next to me.  As I try to mature my work, through reading and research and talking to people, I find myself torn.  Torn between the concept of racial solidarity and human evolution.  I know that both exist but I suppose I want validation form the world, or definition from the world that one is a road trip to the other.

                While teaching I am often challenged by either the topic or sometimes even the students to define race or two give a back story to it.  If I’m teaching about the Cuban Revolution then I have to define some aspects of the culture, the relationship to Western powers, what it means to be Latino, where the concept of Latino came from.  If I teach about the Haitian Revolution then I have to answer the classifications and injustices that sparked off such a vicious and lengthy struggle for liberation from the French, English and Dutch empires.  I’m literally forced to explain what I can only personally perceive as insanity. 

                By insanity I mean the lining up of people, in America, and based upon 4 arbitrary characteristics (lips, hair, nose and amount of melanin) creating a whole social system with deep stratifications.  Daily I watch the world around me revolving, pushing against, struggling with, railing at these arbitrary assignments.  Whether it’s young people routinely, and loudly, calling each other nigga or Black and Latino people attributing racial bias to everything that occurs negatively from someone who we would consider White, I see the roiling manifestation of this insanity.  While we’re able to track overt racism and the impact it has on individuals in terms of violence or the prison system or employment ias, I often look at the softer, deeper impacts.  Simply the stress of constantly carrying race as a burden, as a targeting system, as a weapon---whatever classification, Asian, White, Black, etc. you might fall into.  I remember when I was a teenager and I was experimenting with writing, figuring out plots and characters to explore, stories to invent and situations to imagine when race became an obstacle for me.  I’d written a ten notebook opus, The Hemmingways, a twisted ode to shows like Dynasty and Knots Landing and soap operas like One Life To Live.  As an exercise I can say that good parts were in the doing, trying out language and how to describe everything from clothes to the look of a room.  How to build and hold tension.  All the aerobics a young writer needs to go through with.  Suddenly I was confronted within my handwritten script by some characters being White, some Black, some Latino, a couple Asian and what did that mean?  I’d found that characters could attack each other and suddenly racial epithets became available but by their use I had to deal with the fact that meant that my characters, in their bubble micro-verse, had carried in racism.  And if they’d carried in racializing others then what did that mean for their characters?  Suddenly I was further confronted with the fact that I hadn’t done a very thorough job of dealing with race and the situations I was proposing in my fictitious world.  Okay, I thought and continued plotting and designing lives and plots and soon I realized that every time I introduced a character, race was either assumed or had to be explicitly stated.  By that I mean suddenly my characters seemed all White unless I said they weren’t.  And if they weren’t White (or worse if they were) I suddenly had to deal with race.  I found that I couldn’t have a multi-ethnic cast of characters without dealing with race.

                The game over the years in my writing has become when designing a character to consider his or her race and then build a character appropriately.  But if I build them and they don’t fall into White then part of their inherent existence is dealing with race.  I then found that this translated off of the page as well, suddenly I too was conscious of dealing with race, experience race, considering race or purposefully not considering it, shutting off my racial barometer.  It’s possible but difficult.  In fact I wouldn’t call the shutting so much of off as a hypersensitivity to seeing people, seeing the potential for racial classification and trying to experience them beyond it.  For instance, young people, in their early twenties and below, especially women, I’ve noticed, are loud in public and on the train.  When I glance over I have to upbraid myself for racializing that general observation.  Often it’s Black or Latino people but sometimes it’s White ones too.  But I have to catch myself. I have to edit the idea that it’s just Blacks and Latinos.  That the Blacks and Latinos are loud because they’re Black and Latino.  I also notice that White people get negated, are treated like a necessary evil, pushed to the background of reality like white noise or static, unless I have a personal relationship with them.  Is that what they do to people who aren’t White, I wonder?

                I spend a lot of time forgiving people nowadays.  It has a lot to do with understanding that race is a social construct and to my thinking an unclassified mental illness/delusion.  The delusion swings both ways though.  Recently with an invitation form a friend, I started attending a book club.  A Black book club.  She’d mentioned reading some interesting fiction and I thought it was going to go there, that it was going to be more fun fiction rather than the intense non-fiction discourse it became.  It happened right around my own school break from being a student and teaching so I had some mental hard drive space to do some really critical thinking about a text.  What discovered was that we could all agree that we were looking at the world but often times there was a racial prism that we saw through and that prism deposited us in only two possible spaces---us vs. them.  The them were the enemy, the enemy was White people.  Don’t get me wrong there were places and spaces socially and historically where we were reading about overt racism and prejudice but when we rounded ourselves up to the 21^st century, I found a distinct lack of cogent thought.  I found myself throwing out a challenge to the anger and frustration and mental desire to rearrange reality with White people, I challenged the group: What do we want?  What do we really want?  Do we want to create systems and structures or recompense that is the equivalent of prejudice against White people?  Is that the greatest, deepest lesson we’ve collectively learned from oppression?  To be prejudiced?  Did we want to change White people or did we want to become them?

                On the intellectual surface the questions seem salient, even incisive but in the group they became incendiary.  Why?  Over the years of doing workshops and teaching classes and being in classes, I’ve learned that people exist on two wavelengths at the exact same time.  They believe things which they don’t believe.  Or their deeply held beliefs that they use to construct their identity, don’t make sense, aren’t fruitful nor empowering but are viciously defended.  The answers to shifting social power to how to dismantle oppressive structures disintegrated to “…let me tell you how wrong they (White people) are today…”. It became a sort of victims topping game where seething anger and frustration was levelled at anyone who wasn’t seething and frustrated.  I’d hoped to not be in such an arena where I had to defend radical and progressive thinking (that somehow in spite of a truly disturbed and entangled history, we must find a way to dismantle this social delusion for the betterment of all humans) that it wasn’t aligning to White people or just as bad, denying Black people.  But any questioning or non-militant stance or seeking to evolve is often seen by Black people as collaboration, as if there are only two modalities within race.  We’ve adopted the oppressors concept of anything that questions the system is inherently opposed to it and therefore villainous and anyone that doesn’t vehemently deride the  ”other” group is a collaborator with them and a “race traitor”.

                Ironically we’ve learned such tactics and perceptions from the very oppressors we label as oppressors.  We’ve found the enemy and he is us.

                I wish I could tell you that it got better within the book club, it didn’t.  In fact, I watched as others fell out of the group for extremist reasons.  They felt the rhetoric was too extreme or more interestingly some felt it wasn’t’ extreme enough.  But a consensus amongst the people who left was that we were going around in intellectual circles, we were textually revisiting a closed past, we weren’t learning new skills to deal with the oppressive system we found ourselves in at varying levels, we weren’t sharing personal strategies and networking.  We were commiserating and definitively placing blame.  I bring this inclusively full circle to sexuality because I’ve been in groups that did the same but that notably in Black mixed sexuality groups, non-heterosexuality bias/homophobia and misogyny/patriarchy eases it’s way in, nibbles at the edges, offers to become a rallying cry or a standard.

                White people don’t know completely what racism is because they project it but don’t always experience it.

                People who aren’t designated as White think they know accurately what racism and prejudice are and use the value of their being racialized as a measurement of their ability to identify the bias.  “White people label me Black therefore I know what prejudice is.”

                But do we?

                Case in point.  I sit typing in a classroom on the Columbia University campus on a snowy day.  I have a few haunts on campus, buildings where I know classes are over, closer to food spots, closer to the train, that I frequent for my long sessions of editing and typing.  The system here is that if a classroom is free a singular person or during finals sometimes small groups acquire classrooms but if you want it definitely exclusively to yourself, you have to reserve it.  Everyone is trumped by an incoming class.  On this snowy day after three hours of typing, sitting in a hard wooden chair and having pulled a muscle slipping and sliding in the snow, I laid out on the carpeted floor, just to pull my back muscles, to relax them in something other than this crunch I’m in in the seat.  I even found it was warm on the floor by the gentle heating system and I could read by the floro level windows or glance out and muse on passing students.

            Then two officers arrived.

Was I okay?

Yes.

Was I a student?

Yes.  And an employee.

            The public safety officers left. 

         

            Now when I thought about it I wondered had someone spied me through the frosted glass door in this 16-person (pretty small) classroom by myself for the past few hours?  Had they see me lay down and stretch?  Were they concerned I was having a heart attack?  Or was I just a Black man not doing what Blakc men are supposed to do?  The public safety officers were both Black, male and female, and earlier a Latina maintenance worker stopped in, checking to see if she had to clean.  Suddenly I’ve become racially alert or self-conscious.  Have I don’t something wrong?  Did a passing White person think I was out of pocket in my actions?  What can I do or not do besides sit and type?  AM I under video surveillance in the classroom?

            

           Now here’s the rub.  I sure as hell know and notice that the White kids ain’t thinking this deeply about the whole situation.  In face when confronted with these racial-maybe situations I imagine myself “White” to check reality without my sense of Black identity and all the suspicion that goes with it.  (Harshly I want to get one of those shirts that’s says Keep Calm and add…It’s Just Melanin.  Or Keep Clam I won’t Be Raping You Today.  Or Keep Calm, I Won’t Be Asking for Money.)   Aside from my dark thought digression what I do see is that I regularly tour through about three different buildings, on various floors, midterms and finals increasing my visitations, to get blocks of time to work in relative quiet, in a safe, clean environment.  But race, the social delusion can make me crumple into either a frothing Black warrior wronged by the invisible White gaze siccing the Black proletariat workers on me, their brother!  Or Herbert Marcuse’s thoughts about the societal subject taking on the internalized paranoia of the “being watched by Big Brother” stance whenever challenged so as to self police.  Or suddenly uncomfortable in a room I’ve been coming to for years, when it’s free and have gotten an immense amount of work done.

                What if, as I think about, as has happened in the past, they were just doing a routine touring of the building, saw my stuff on the table---laptop, books, Pepsi, coat and wondered where I was?  What if they were checking on me to make sure I hadn’t had a heart attack or some sort of genius mental stroke out? 

                Has race gone so deeply into our collective psyche that one has to literally sit back and do a five-minute critical self-analysis to figure out reality?  And what becomes of those who can’t critically think this reflectively, this calmly, present back to public safety I’m fine, my back just hurts?

                I’m evolving.  I know race doesn’t exist.  I know it’s an illusion.  But in order to know that I literally have to wage psychic war, mainly on myself.

Enjoy!!!

Thank you for reading.

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