The following is an adapted excerpt from Shameless: The Making of Black Gay Identities in LA by Terrell J. A. Winder (NYU Press, 2026).
Shameless is an in-depth exploration of the ways that young Black gay men in Los Angeles come together to learn how to navigate racial and sexual stigma in everyday interactions.
Based on four years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork resulting in observations with over 200 young men in a Los Angeles community health organization, in-depth interviews with self-identified Black queer men, observations with gay kinship families, and media content analysis, Terrell J. A. Winder paints a full picture of the socialization and stigma negotiations of young Black gay men.
Winder explains how traditional strategies like passing and covering can become untenable and ineffective for young Black gay men dealing with multiple stigmas simultaneously, who are looking to experience their identities with a sense of pride, rather than as a source of shame.
How about we take this to the next level?
Subscribe to our newsletter for a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today
The first ball that I ever attended was in Los Angeles. I had grown up in Baltimore and remember adamantly refusing to be involved with anything house/ballroom related. As a teen, one of the parents in a burgeoning house in Baltimore (whose name escapes me here) explained to me that I should join his house to have a gay mother and gay father. When I asked him what a gay mother and father were for, he explained that they could guide me and tell me what to do with my life. I replied that I had two parents already and definitely did not need two more people trying to tell me what to do. In my own ways, I had internalized the limited and stigmatizing messages about my own community. At that point in life, I was not “out” or even sure about my sexuality entirely, so I rejected something that seemed like a step just a bit too far into the life.
Even in college, I continued to avoid certain elements of gay life that I deemed “too much” or “too far out there.” I was no longer living home in Baltimore and was exploring all that New York City had to offer, but I still found myself carrying the negative sentiments and stereotypes of certain parts of Black gay life. Coming of age in New York City meant learning about local organizations for LGBTQ people that I did not know of when I was in Baltimore, classes about queer theory and LGBTQ studies, school clubs and organizations that focused on both my racial and sexual identities, and a chance to just be. When I finished my undergraduate education at Columbia University and told my close friends that I would be going to UCLA, I did not intend to study anything related to sexuality at all. Yet, once it became clear that this was the path of my research, one of my best friends told me that I would finally need to attend a ball if I truly wanted to understand all of Black gay life. Although I was reticent, I soon realized that he was very right.
It was at my Los Angeles field site, UpLiftLA, a community organization with a strong connection to service in the West Coast house/ballroom community, that I finally attended my first ball. I entered the space and greeted the few people whom I had come to know over the short time I had spent there by that point. I was immediately fascinated by the level of production that went into the event. I also quickly learned that I had no idea what was going on or what to expect. I had seen the canonical film Paris Is Burning, but things were much different from that film from over 25 years ago.
Related
Category Is: 20 fascinating facts about the controversial yet vital ‘Paris Is Burning’
Nearly 35 years later, ‘Paris Is Burning” remains an electrifying document of queer cultural history.
Ultimately, I ended up onstage, sitting near the judges panel and handing out the trophies to the winners. As each category progressed, I learned more and more about the ball and more about myself. I learned to let go of some of those things that I had almost forgotten that I learned to feel about my own community. I began to wonder what my life would have looked like if I had a community organization like UpLiftLA in Baltimore or if I had chosen to join a gay family or lived in a city with a dedicated gay neighborhood known worldwide. These ponderings became the backbone of this project as I sought to understand how Black gay men came to be in the “City of Angels.”
For me, Shameless serves two purposes: (1) I hope to illustrate clear examples of how stigma, discrimination, and prejudice can be navigated successfully for young Black gay men who might find themselves looking for answers in these pages; (2) I hope to make scholars and researchers of stigma reconsider the destigmatization enterprise and to problematize how we approach ideas about combating stigmas more broadly.
For these reasons, some of the things that I detail in the book will not seem exactly novel or new. Instead, they are evidence of the enduring and ongoing struggles faced by Black gay men and other communities of queer people of color. Yet, instead of just giving in to the imposition of stigma and shame, I offer a way that some young Black gay men taught each other (and me) to reject the burden of stigma no matter the costs. It is my hope that this book inspires more of us to do the same and that, for people looking to ally themselves to stigmatized communities, they learn what will actually contribute to meaningful change.
It was a typical Wednesday night in November 2012. Around 6 p.m., I showed up to UpLiftLA, a local community organization serving the Black queer community of Los Angeles, a bit early for the 7 p.m. men’s leadership meeting, as I had for the past nine months. Gathering together in the common space, a group of fifteen young Black gay men began to discuss their weeks and the excitement of the previous weekend. After a tense discussion about gender expression and sexual positioning, the conversation turned to what it meant to live openly as Black gay men in the city of Los Angeles.
As the conversation continued, the young men shared their “clear” reasons for why gender expressions are key to relationship formation. One young boy reflected on his previous attitude toward seeing other gay people in public when he was growing up. Kareem was around five foot eight and dark-skinned. His braces slightly poked out as he spoke quickly: “When I was younger, I was harder on gay people; I hated gay people! Like, I’d see it and say something before my straight friends could like, ‘Fucking faggots, man!’”
Visibly bothered by Kareem’s admission, some of the young men shifted in their seats and rolled their eyes but refrained from sharing vocal judgment as Kareem continued to share. Yet, several other boys shared that they too struggled with seeing other gay people out in public who might bring too much attention to them by extension or, in the words of 20-year-old Kyle, being “all extra’d out.” He continued, “I’ve been jumped before. So, when I go to certain hoods, I throw on my nigga outfit. But I’d go out with a weave and makeup on if I’m comfortable around people like the Revlons or Escadas.” I quickly noticed that some of the older men in the room were bothered by the direction of the conversation and notably locked eyes with each other. They stared on with expressions of disbelief and disgust that someone would change his appearance to hide his sexuality.
One of these young men, Malachi, bided his time until he had heard enough group approval for this attempt to pass as heterosexual in public and decided to interject. Slightly older, at 28, Malachi fervently shared his opinion. He leaned forward, uncrossing his legs as he spoke: “I’ve been sitting here pissed off by what you all are saying!” Malachi continued, “You have internalized self-hate! Who the fuck cares how you look? Who the fuck cares how you talk?!” Although he spoke to the whole group, his eyes lingered for a moment in the direction of Kyle as he said, “I’m so tired of hearing it’s only okay to be gay after the sun goes down or at a ball. Some people can hide their being gay, but I cannot. I’ve been jumped and stabbed for being gay, but I haven’t changed!”
The tension in this heated discussion reveals the fundamental question at the heart of this book: What is the best way to respond to social stigma about one’s identity?
For some people, the answer has been to hide elements of one’s identity from a stigmatizing public by doing what the sociologist Erving Goffman called “passing” or “covering.” Yet, while passing and covering an identity works for some stigmatized individuals, others, like Malachi, find these strategies to be markers of internalized stigma. In effect, for Malachi and some of the other men that I highlight in this book, hiding or downplaying one’s identity for the sake of another’s gaze is tantamount to approving of and accepting the stigma about themselves—a self-betrayal.
This group of men instead espouse an attitude toward their racial and sexual identities that rejects the burden of stigma and refuses to bear the weight of the stigmatizer’s gaze. But how do these young men learn to do this? For surely it is not easy to do, as Malachi suggests—to simply bear the violence or willingly endure the spitting, stabbing, and verbal assaults that can come from outsiders who may view you as socially deviant—challenges that riddle so many of the narratives that young Black gay men shared with me for this project. To this point, this book reveals the various techniques, strategies, and resources available to young Black gay men who are seeking to turn away from stigma and accept their identities as “normal.”
The driving force of Shameless is to uncover how young Black gay men are rejecting responses to stigma that often validate stigmatizing views of their identities. Most of the young men whom I encountered shared some form of negative stigma or messaging that they had received in their lives, often from the people closest to them. I explore these stigmatizing messages and experiences explicitly in chapters 1 and 2. Yet all of these young men do not readily accept the negativity about their race or sexuality, and instead their stories illuminate how they learned to overcome not only the negative feelings of others but the negativity they came to embody and internalize about themselves.
Having grown up hearing a refrain of admonishments to hell, beliefs that they were extreme sinners or that their identities were “against God,” most of the Black gay men whom I studied first needed to accept their own identities as unproblematic. For this, I detail how these young men come to reject these stigmatizing messages and instead choose to refashion an identity that is built on pride, acceptance, and love for their sexuality, especially among a racialized community. I call the process of explicit rejection of these stigmas and acceptance of self unspoiling.
Shameless: The Making of Black Gay Identities in LA by Terrell J. A. Winder is available now wherever books are sold.
Sign up for the Queerty newsletter to stay on top of the hottest stories in LGBTQ+ entertainment, politics, and culture.
