What Can Brown Do for You? Race, Sexuality, and the Future of LGBTQ Politics (2010) Available to Purchase

This chapter, delivered as the 2010 Kessler Lecture at the City University of New York Graduate Center, grapples with the failure of the mainstream LGBTQ movement to champion racial equality in its mission, and argues that this failure reflects the single-issue focus of the movement’s leaders, whose default definition of “gay” has been based on the ideas and experiences of the movement’s organizers, i.e., white men. The chapter offers an analysis of different ways in which the mainstream movement has avoided discussions of racial justice and argues that it has done so at its peril.