Research on Lesbian and Gay Populations Within the African American Community: What Have We Learned?

Research on lesbian and gay populations within African American communities has, not surprisingly, focused on many of the same issues that have confronted the sometimes opposed and sometimes intertwined social movements for Black and gay liberation. Our review of this literature examines these issues following the same general historical trajectory within which they arose. Thus we begin with the question of homophobia, examining how early work in the field adopted a homophobic stance in viewing homosexuality as a mental illness or European American strategy for destroying the Black race, while more recent work has looked at homophobia itself as the real illness and/or destructive strategy. Most of this early work, and its legacy today, has focused on Black gay men. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the rise of the second wave of the feminist movement meant that lesbianism became an important issue in research on African American sexuality. With gender added to the matrix of race and sexuality, research began to focus on the effects of double and triple minority status on the mental health outcomes of Black gays and lesbians. In the 1980s, of course, HIV/AIDS became a dominant area of concern in research on this population. Only recently have researchers taken a healthy black gay and lesbian identity as a given in studies comparing homosexual and heterosexual African American populations.