The Michigan Daily I michigandaily.com I Thursday, October10, 2013
University alumni Noel Gordon and Zesheng Chen
attended the same party their freshman year, but had
drastically different experiences. Gordon, a former col-
umnist for The Michigan Daily, experienced a racially
charged confrontation with another partygoer, while
Chen had the time of his life. Still, for both men, the
party helped them realize how their racial identities
couldn't be separated from their identities as queer. Not
long after, during the winter semester of 2012, Gordon
and Chen founded the Coalition for Queer People of
Color.
That story is how LSA seniors Alex Ngo and Ozi
Uduma recounted the formation of the Coalition for
Queer People of Color. Ngo and Uduma serve as two
of the three current co-chairs of the Coalition, and
explained how Gordon and Chen recognized the ways
other student organizations weren't always welcoming
to queer students of color.
"I think generally they just found that, in the spaces
where they were supposed to feel comfortable and sup-
posed to feel the most themselves, they still felt this
kind of conflict happening where they maybe had to
put their sexual orientation up front first and kind of
leave their racial identity to the back burner in order to
fit in," Ngo said. "The Coalition came about as a way to
fill that need."
No such thing as a single-issue struggle
When Ngotried to be a part of Asian spaces and com-
munities on campus, he confronted an obstacle. As a
queer Asian, he wasn't always welcome in these groups,
which were unified through their racial identities-but
didn't really allow Ngo to also bring his queer identity
to the table. Sometimes the Asian students around him
would even say homophobic remarks, leading him to
consider whether he should hide his queer identity.
Uduma, a Martha Cook Diversity Peer Educator and
the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, explained that
spaces for people of color on campus sometimes carry
a fear or uneasiness about confronting and discuss-
ing sexuality. Their third co-chair, LSA senior Ramiro
Alvarez Cabriales, agreed and spoke specifically in
terms of the Latin@ community on campus.
"I think the biggest scapegoat when interacting
in predominantly Latin@ student of color spaces is
that it is in our culture to be hyper-masculine or that
it is inherently in our culture to be heteronormative,"
Cabriales said. "Those spaces can be very homophobic."
Not only do the clubs for students of particular racial
or ethnic identities not always welcome queer people,
but some of the predominantly white LGBTQ groups on
campus also have a disconnect when it comes to race.
Cabriales and Uduma both expressed their frustra-
tion with the "gay is the new black" rhetoric that some
LGBTQ organizations have adopted.
"What if you're both?" Cabriales asked.
When LGBTQ organizations try to equate racial
oppression to oppression based on sexuality, they
ignore and marginalize queer people of color. Cabriales
and Ngo's racial identities can't be separated from their
queerness, and yet in some spaces, they were made to
feel like they should prioritize one over the other.
"Tokenizing happens a lot - fetishizing, exotifi-
cation of black and brown bodies," Cabriales said of.
predominantly white LGBTQ spaces. "It's made very
evident that we are different in queer spaces. It's made
very evident that either we are unwelcome or obsessed
over in this weird 'I want to hook up with a brown boy'
kind of way."
These queer spaces on campus often reflect the agen-
da of the mainstream LGBTQ movement, which simi-
larly doesn't speak for or include queer people of color.
The mainstream movement is currently very focused
on marriage equality and the rights attached to mar-
riage, and this priority doesn't necessarily always reso-
nate with communities of color.
"I used to be undocumented, and most of my fam-
ily continues to be undocumented," Cabriales said. "I
feel like I'm wasting my time to continue to talk about
marriage when there are queer people who are undocu-
mented. Marriage isn't evena possibility for them."
"My parents are straight and don't even have health
insurance," Cabriales said, emphasizing how the fight
for marriage equality sometimes ignores broader social
justice issues.
"I experience homosexuality in a very different way
because of the way my family is structured," Cabria-
les said. "I experience it in more than one language, in
more than one country, and white Americans don't get
that. They don't get that sometimes you have to come
out in English, sometimes in Spanish. You have to find
words for both, because no one is taught the words to
come out ever because you're presumed to be straight
from birth."
See RADICAL LOVE, Page 3B