Growing up as Black queer non-binary person in the South, my understanding of racialization and gendering is it occurs in social situations has significantly shifted the past four years since I have been in college. Before senior year of high school, I never understood the depths and nuances of what it meant to be Black, especially in a society that is fueled by antiblackness. I oftentimes “priviliged” my queer idenity growing up as high schooler. After coming out as a freshman at fifteen, I dived into media of all kinds to understand what it really meant to be gay. Young and impressionable as I was, I sought after images and representation of queer life to understanding how to exist within the world. Doing so caused such a heavy investment into my queer identity that I failed to understand how racialization and gendering became mapped onto me. I became ignorant to the fact that antiblackness overdetermined how I created value for my identity especially in relation to gender and queerness.
As a queer kid growing up in the digital age, I often times looked to YouTube as a map for understanding for what queerness looked like. In particular, one of the most influential content creators in doing that for me was Youtuber Connor Franta. Franta is a White gay male Youtuber that created a wide variety of content ranging from entertaining comedic skits to sometimes more serious and raw content, one of which was his coming-out video. Prior to that video, Franta often marketed himself as hypermasculine and aligned himself with the stereotypical image of the “jock.” This radically changed whenever he released that coming-out video.
It marked a stylistic and narrative break away from the usual content that he created. Admittedly, I didn’t pay much attention to Franta until after the release of the video. The video was met with overwhelming support from long-time fans and even generated new audiences for Franta because of this embrace of his identity. Without explicitly realizing it at the time, I was seeing that my understanding of queerness and gender had radically shifted. For years, I had been afraid to embrace myself because I was afraid of being excluded because of my queerness. For Franta, though, that did not seem to be an issue, which convinced me at the time that queerness could be brought within the realm of liberal society and celebrated for its authenticity. This became even more apparent to me as his social media and digital clout seem to increase every month after the coming-out video released.
From the inspiration of Franta and other queer Youtubers, I chose to embrace my idenity and publicly come out in high school, which was met with heavy resistance and instiutitional violence. I was often times made a spectacle of with very invasive questions about my sexuality and gaslight about my queerness because of my race specifically. Looking back at those incidents years after, I realize now the violence I met at the hands of other dominant groups of people happened because there is a contradiction between blackness and other identity positions. My own coming-out narrative failed to generate any sympathy and praise because I was not the stereotypical queer subject. The popular imagination, as evidenced by the attitudes and ideologies of the dominant culture at my school, conceives the perfect queer subject as someone that is often times fragile, feminine, and most of all White. All of these adjectives applied to not only Franta, but other images of queerness that I was seen being placed on media with shows like Degrassi, Faking It, and even the popular coming of age queer movie Love, Simon. These forms of media failed to generate a nuanced and complex understanding of how race ties into how queer folks experience their identity. I was socialized from the start that to be a desirable queer subject that one must be White and that their gender identity had to cleary defined and lack ambiguity of any sort i.e. either hypermasculine or hyperfeminine.
It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I started reckoning with these dominant conceptions of race, gender identity and peformance, and queerness. Senior year of high school saw me getting more into music than I had previously the years before. I was tired of sitting at lunch with my male classmates and hearing them talk about rap music in particular and not being able to engage in those conversations because I wrote the genre off when I was younger as being homophobic, over-sexual, and misoyntistic without considering the nuance of how rap music informs Black identity in particular. After hearing the works of musicians like J Cole, Juice Wrld, and 21 Savage, I became enthralled by rap music. Having denied the validity of the genre for the above reasons above and also because I was a self-hating Black person because of how easily antiblackness as ideaology creeps over all of civil society and its mediated instiutitions, rap music was a form of cultural education that taught me what it meant to be a Black man, which is what I identified with at the time. Rap music is where I learned that to be Black means to always be sought after and desired to “be cool,” because the dominant White majority sought the aesethics of blackness and Black culture, while also being hated, exlcuded, and seen as a “problem” for society because blackness is a state of chaos and disorder as the racial “Other.” Black male identity in rap music was constructed around being a menace to society, which is often why these rappers discussed the United State’s long history of structural violence against Black men because they are overdetermined as being “trouble, young boys’’ that end up becoming violent criminals that needed to be policed in society.
Media is a constantly changing field that attempts to address differing ideologies and is a battlefield for understanding and creating power and knowledge in society. My own experiences with predominantly White saturated media convinced me of the trick of society that members of oppressed groups experience violence in structurally similar ways. As the analysis of my own lived experience has articulated, nothing could be further from the truth. From own positionality in society as a Black queer non-binary person, I have become more attentive to how antiblackness functions as an ideaology in civil society to erase the specificity of how blackness interacts with other identity positions.
