"As a white gay man committed to advocacy, I was naturally drawn to [James] Baldwin and eager to hear what he had to say about LGBTQ equality in America. What I discovered, though, was not at all what I was expecting. Baldwin, more than anyone else, taught me that although I am gay, I am white, and that being white always involves persistent privilege that must be recognized and accounted for. Baldwin explains that white LGBTQ men and women feel slighted precisely because they know that had they been straight, they would have been heirs to incomparable privilege. In a 1984 interview with Richard Goldstein, then the editor of the Village Voice, Baldwin said, "I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly." He went on to say:
Their reaction seems to me in direct proportion to their sense of feeling cheated of the advantages which accrue to white people in a white society. There's an element, it has always seemed to me, of bewilderment and complaint. Now that may sound very harsh, but the gay world as such is no more prepared to accept black people than anywhere else in society."[For the full article, see here.]
