Race in the LGBT community: As we fight the world’s prejudices, do we still need to face our own?

“People’s attractions are something informed in part by what you grew up with, so perhaps what we term as ‘preferences’ are just ingrained racism, that we’ve been brought up that way,” said Mike Niyompong, a gay management consultant and former member of the Denver GLBT commission.

“If you look across the world, there’s an idealization of white or Caucasian features, over, say, Asian features. Sharper lines, lighter color of the skin – what the general public seems to think are beautiful are Caucasian models. Or even Asian models with more Caucasian-looking features,” said Niyompong, who is Thai. “And if you look across the globe, it’s what’s on TV, what’s on the Internet – it’s the Western European influence. That infiltrates other cultures and makes people want to adapt and look more like that picture.”

But mention of the idea that the LGBT community still has hang-ups about race is frequently met with resistance, dismissiveness or even retaliation.

Some people of color who spoke to Out Front were reluctant to describe a personal encounter with prejudice within the LGBT community or to even mention a specific observation that racism exists, out of concern about being labeled “that” kind of person, accused of playing the victim or being “angry” – opting instead to keep themselves entirely unquoted and off-the-record. Some said there could be professional consequences because they’d inevitably be criticizing some of those they work with.

“The racism and sexism that exists in the mainstream culture definitely exists in the LGBT community, too,” Niyompong said. “It’s not as widely accepted – the LGBT identity is supposed to be open and inclusive, so it goes against the very identity of the LGBT community to acknowledge it.”

Still, a few community groups and leaders are eager to address the topic head on.

“There’s an expectation that if you’re in the LGBT community and dealing with homophobia, that means you’re not going to be racist or sexist,” said Sandhya Luther, director of advocacy at the Colorado Anti-Violence Program. “But if you’re not working on your own racism and sexism, it’s not going to go away just because you’re queer.”

The Colorado Anti-Violence Program, which works with the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs to track statistics on violence against LGBT people and develops resources and programs to address it, provided statistics that Luther said are evidence of the challenges: not only anecdotal accounts of racist attitudes acted out in intimate-partner violence between LGBT partners, but a shockingly disproportionate number of people of color among the victims of hate crime murders.

According to the Anti-Violence Coalition’s national reporting, 80 percent of the 30 reported LGBT hate murder victims in 2011 were people of color, up from 2010, when 70 percent of the 27 victims that year were people of color. Transgender women alone were 40 percent of the victims in 2010, though in 2011 that dropped to 10 percent of a statistic that included victims who survived murder attempts.

“The whole movement seems to have become about marriage equality, as if that’s all we want and when we have it the movement can just go away,” Luther said, “This feeling that once we get married we’ll no longer be treated differently. And that’s not true. Gay men of color, women, trans people, gender non-conforming people are going to be more interested in health care, employment nondiscrimination and violence.”

Luther was sure to clarify that she isn’t against marriage equality, “We aren’t against that at all,” she said, “it just isn’t a priority for us. The anti-violence movement is not a glamorous thing.”

In 2010, a Needs Assessment Survey of 4,600 Coloradans by the then newly formed One Colorado, a Colorado statewide LGBT advocacy organization, found another striking disparity – that for Latino and African-American respondents, racism was a greater concern than homophobia or anti-LGBT discrimination, top issues for other segments of the surveyed group.