A Quote by Roger Ross Williams
I felt like I was an outsider growing up in the black church, as a gay man, in a poor community.
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One of the facets of growing up the way I did, I never had the experience of being solely in the black community. Even my family, my mother is what they call Creole, so she's part French, part black, and grew up in Louisiana. It's a very specific kind of blackness that is different than what is traditionally thought of as the black community and black culture. So, I never felt a part of whatever that was.
Part of my struggle with being gay was that a lot of my homophobia was internalized because of the cues that I was - received. I didn't see anybody like myself in the culture. RuPaul was the closest to a gay, out black man that I had growing up.
I was brought up in black neighborhoods in South Baltimore. And we really felt like we were very black. We acted black and we spoke black. When I was a kid growing up, where I came from, it was hip to be black. To be white was kind of square.
When you go to a church and you see the pastor of that church with a philosophy and a program that's designed to bring black people together and elevate black people, join that church. Join that church. If you see where the NAACP is preaching and practicing that which is designed to make black nationalism materialize, join the NAACP. Join any kind of organization, civic, religious, fraternal, political, or otherwise that's based on lifting the black man up and making him master of his own community.
There are so many stereotypes of how you have to be as a black man, growing up in the community as a man.
I think that growing up very poor in a very wealthy town gave me a sense of being an outsider, and I hated it when I was growing up.
When I first came up, the whole AIDS epidemic was starting, and the gay community that I experienced from the beginning of my career was mostly - and overwhelmingly - concerned with staying alive. And, also, I felt really aware of the preciousness of life and time. The gay community and people who were HIV-positive were treated so badly, and I was very disturbed by things. But I also saw a lot of love and connection in the gay community at that time.
I always felt like an outsider growing up. In school, I felt like I never fit in. But it didn't help when my mother, instead of buying me glue for school projects, would tell me to just use rice.
The Koreans that make their money in our community: If we have a Black bank, you'll find they don't deposit anything of what they take from us into a Black bank that would serve our community. They set up a bank in their own community. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, my Teacher, called people like this "Bloodsuckers of the poor." All they want is to make a dollar, and run.
When you're the artsy, weirdo, introverted outsider growing up, you don't fit into your community.
New York is about as cosmopolitan as it gets. It's a fairly mixed and woke town, so there weren't a lot of situations growing up where I felt like the outsider or the alien.
Historically different groups find different things in each comics, as with *X-Men*. Gay readers find parallels to living a closeted lifestyle or choosing to come out and be openly gay. Black readers find a relevance to their lives growing up in America as a black guy. Picked-on brainy kids find a metaphor for being an outsider. It's a simple enough, and direct enough metaphor that it has different shades for different people. And so each reader to some degree gets out of it what they bring to it. That's one of the things I think that makes *X-Men* such a strong property.
Within the lesbian community I am Black, and within the Black community I am a lesbian. Any attack against Black people is a lesbian and gay issue, because I and thousands of other Black women are part of the lesbian community. Any attack against lesbians and gays is a Black issue, because thousands of lesbians and gay men are Black. There is no hierarchy of oppression.
When I was growing up, I grew up in church--my father was a pastor--so when I was growing up in Trinidad, I'd close all the windows in the church and go in the church every day after school and get a little microphone and pretend all these people were in the pews, and I would sing to them.
I grew up in a small town in a low-income family and was the only black kid in my elementary school. I felt like an outsider, and since I didn't know of LGBT people - much less LGBT black women - living happy, healthy, and successful lives, I didn't believe I could ever marry or have a child.
The establishment wants to connect with people who are like them, and I wasn't. I'm a black gay man from a poor working-class family. Most of the people who look like me are in prison.
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