COLUMNIST — DEAN ATTA
UK Black Pride
A few days after I came out, aged 15, my mum bought me a copy of Attitude. This was in 2000 and it was her way of showing acceptance.
She reads Vogue and loves clothes shopping. I’ve never taken much interest in either but I remember her telling me: “You’re gay, you’re meant to like shopping.” I never understood why my mum, a straight woman, thought she knew what gay men liked.
When I was younger, she’d take me to WH Smith and let me pick the magazines I wanted. These would usually be about aliens, ancient Egypt and dinosaurs. As a teenager, these were as fascinating to me as gay culture. Going to the Natural History Museum, in London, and seeing fossils and life- size animatronic dinosaurs for the fi rst time brought my childhood magazines to life, as did visiting Egypt to see the pyramids.
I didn’t see myself when reading those old issues of Attitude because being gay is not something a magazine can accurately represent, unless each gay person has their own personalised copy. I think this is why social media is so popular today: it allows each of us to represent ourselves. Nor did I see myself when watching Queer as Folk in my bedroom with the volume down low. Mum had it on in the living room, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch with her.
I didn’t even see myself when I eventually went to gay bars, clubs and to Pride.
At 17, when I started writing and performing spoken word poetry, some of my poems were about being gay.
White audience members would come up to me and ask if it was more diff icult for me to come out as gay because I was black; were my family religious, did I have to leave the Church, was I afraid of being disowned and did I experience a lot of homophobia in the black community?
At this point of my life I had not considered the intersection of my black and gay identities. Although the term “intersectionality” had been coined by the American civil rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw more than a decade earlier, I wasn’t aware of it.
But I was aware, in my late teens and early twenties, that many of the black gay and bisexual men I was meeting in clubs were “on the down low,” meaning they were only out to a select few people on a need- to- know basis.
There was a sense that being gay was something private, not an identity, and certainly not something to be celebrated. It wasn’t until 2007, when
I was 22, when I went to my fi rst UK Black Pride that these misconceptions changed for me.
I saw myself in among thousands of out and proud black LGBTQ people. That’s why I go back every year.
I’d like to think if I was a teen coming out today, this is where my
mum would take me.
“There was a sense that being gay was something private, not to be celebrated”