Chapter 1: The Blame Game: Why the Black Community Scapegoats Gay Men
I. The Scapegoat Strategy
It starts young—the ridicule, the suspicion, the othering. You don’t even have to come out to feel the weight of it. The barbershop banter, the coded warnings from older men, the casual way "gay" gets tossed around as an insult among kids on the basketball court. For Black gay boys, the message is clear long before they understand what their difference even means: You are the problem.
I remember standing outside a corner store in my neighborhood, waiting for my cousin to come out with a pack of Now and Laters. A man, worn down by life, missing teeth and barely steady on his feet, glanced at me—a kid no older than thirteen—and sneered, "Lil' punks like you the reason the community so messed up. Y'all the ones bringing us down." This man, who clearly had been ravaged by addiction and systemic neglect, still found the time—the energy—to punch down. Even from rock bottom, he had enough strength to stand on the backs of gay Black boys.
P.A.P. (Project, Abuse, Punch-down). This is the scapegoat strategy in action: a reflexive need to blame the most vulnerable for the pain inflicted by the powerful. The harsh truth is that the Black community—our community—has mastered the art of punching down when it feels powerless to punch up. And gay Black men? We're the easiest targets, standing at the intersection of two identities marked for struggle.
The thesis is simple but uncomfortable: The Black community scapegoats gay men to deflect from systemic oppression, internalized white supremacy, and its own failures in leadership and accountability. It’s easier to call a gay man weak than to confront the structures that keep all Black people disenfranchised. It’s safer to police sexuality than to challenge the police themselves. And so the blame flows downhill, landing squarely on the backs of those least able to fight back—gay Black men.
But this chapter—this book—isn't about licking wounds. It's about calling out a culture of cowardice masquerading as “pro-black.” It's about showing how the blame game not only harms Black gay men but weakens the entire community. Because, make no mistake, homophobia doesn't protect the Black community—it fractures it. And until we face this truth, true liberation will remain out of reach for all of us.
II. Everyday Expressions of Homophobia in the Black Community
Step into any Black barbershop—the so-called sanctuary of Black masculinity—and just listen. Within twenty minutes, someone's manhood is bound to be challenged, and more often than not, "gay" is hurled as the ultimate insult. "Man, you look like a bitch." I heard those words myself, spat at me by a grown man when I was just 11 years old, sitting in the barbershop. I was just a boy, dressed like a boy, minding my own business. I hadn't done a thing to provoke it. I was targeted simply for how I looked—something entirely beyond my control.
The barbershop, the church, the family cookout—spaces meant to offer Black people refuge from a world determined to break us. Yet, for Black gay men, they often feel less like sanctuaries and more like battlegrounds. Family gatherings aren't much better. Aunties exchange knowing glances and whispers about the "funny" cousin who never brings a girl around. Grandfathers grunt in disapproval at boys who don't walk or talk the way they think a man should. And in the age of social media, the judgment is even more unfiltered. A quick scroll through Black Twitter or Instagram during Pride Month reveals a flood of homophobic slurs, often from those who proudly call themselves "pro-Black." Somehow, the fight for Black liberation always seems to overlook—or worse, blame—Black queer people.
This casual, everyday homophobia isn't just personal—it's systemic. Look at how the media portrays Black men. Gay Black men are almost always cast as weak, overly feminine, or comic relief—never as strong, complex individuals. We're depicted as punchlines, stripped of masculinity, or as cautionary tales of what a "real man" shouldn't be. And when we're not being mocked, we're framed as threats to the so-called stability of Black families. Somehow, every problem in the Black community—white supremacy, police violence, mass incarceration, and the spread of drugs—gets laid at our feet. If Black men would just "man up," the narrative goes, we could overcome centuries of oppression. Rarely do we see nuanced, dignified portrayals of our lives—only caricatures meant to reinforce the idea that queerness and strength can't coexist.
And yet, the most telling example of this scapegoating comes from those at the very bottom—the ones crushed hardest by systemic oppression. That’s why the phrase "Every toothless crackhead still finds time to blame gays" resonates so deeply. It’s not just an exaggeration—it’s reality. Even those who have lost everything, stripped of dignity by poverty, addiction, and systemic neglect, still find solace in feeling superior to gay Black men. It’s as if no matter how far they’ve fallen, they can still cling to the one thing society values above all else in Black men: masculinity.
For them, blaming us is easier than confronting the real enemy. It’s easier to believe that the rise of queerness somehow caused the fall of the Black community than to reckon with the white supremacist system that flooded our neighborhoods with drugs, gutted our schools, and filled prisons with our fathers, sons, and brothers. The irony is brutal: the same system that broke them convinces them that we’re the problem. The system creates the problems and the system creates the solutions. And so, even from rock bottom, they punch down, not up. Because in a world that denies Black men power, hating gay Black men is one of the few forms of dominance left within reach.
The irony is thick. The very community that knows the pain of marginalization—the sting of being blamed for societal decay—turns around and targets its queer members, but not equally. The attacks almost always fall on Black gay men, not lesbians. Why? Because it’s not just about homophobia; it’s about protecting the fragile, performative image of the "strong Black man." Any deviation from that narrow mold is seen as a threat—not just to the individual, but to the collective identity.
But what gets ignored in this desperate defense of masculinity is a simple truth: straight people created gays, not the other way around. Gay men didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth Rock landed on us. We’re not some external force corrupting the community—we’re direct products of the community’s preexisting dysfunction. If gays are defective, it’s because our parents and the communities in which we were raised were also defective. Every queer child is born into a straight household, raised in a culture built by straight norms. If anything, queerness is a testament to the breakdown within heterosexual structures, not a cause of it. Blaming us is like blaming the smoke while ignoring the fire. I'm rubber, you're glue; whatever you say bounces off of us and sticks to heterosexuals.
III. The Black Community’s Cowardice: Punching Down to Avoid Accountability
The heart of this scapegoating is fear—fear of white supremacy, fear of vulnerability, fear of failing to meet the impossible standards imposed on Black masculinity. For centuries, white supremacy has defined Black manhood in brutal, unforgiving terms. Strength without softness. Authority without empathy. Success without compromise. Any deviation from this script invites ridicule, punishment, or even death.
But it's not just internal fear—it's fear of the white gaze. The world has long scrutinized Black men under an unforgiving lens, eager to find weakness, to justify violence, to uphold the myth of Black inferiority. To many, Black gay men represent a crack in the armor, a challenge to the image Black communities have worked so hard to fortify against white judgment. If Black men are supposed to be unshakable pillars of strength in a world designed to crush them, then queerness—feminized, vilified, and misunderstood—becomes the ultimate betrayal. It’s easier to attack those who defy the script than to confront the truth: that the script itself was written by the very system oppressing us all.
In the face of such impossible expectations, many Black men seek refuge in performative masculinity—a performance designed to shield them from both white aggression and internal insecurity. It’s armor, not identity, built to project strength while concealing vulnerability. And nothing threatens that performance more than the existence of openly gay Black men. We—by simply living authentically—expose the cracks in the facade. If manhood isn't tied to domination, if strength can coexist with compassion, then the entire illusion collapses.
But confronting that truth means questioning everything—the standards imposed by white supremacy, the survival tactics passed down like gospel, the very definition of what it means to be a Black man. That kind of reckoning is terrifying, so instead of facing it, the community lashes out. It’s easier to scapegoat us than to admit that performative masculinity was never true strength to begin with.
Gay Black men become the convenient punching bags for a community terrified of confronting its own vulnerability. It's easier to call us faggots than to admit that white supremacy has made...
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