KAOS: MUSED Magazine, Viktor Kerney and a hankering for racial segregation

"If you only have love for your own race, then you only leave space to discriminate."

If there's one thing we can take for granted, it's the obsession MUSED Magazine (apparently, the "Authoritative Voice For Modern Black Gay Men") has with interracial relationships, packed as it is with articles like "Seeking The Ideal Black Gay Couple When Interracial Ones Aren’t Enuf", and most recently "28 Questions For Black Men Who ONLY Date White Men". What surprised me most about the latter article was the author, someone I had admired for years, Viktor Kerney, who also writes the blog Maybe It's Just Me. But his stance on this issue saddened me.

Let's be clear about this. The gay community has huge problems with race, and the problem lies primarily with the majority of white gay men, who are, without a doubt, horribly racist. There's an excellent series on this at FS Magazine. But articles like Viktor Kerney's are bigoted and mean spirited, calculated to cause hurt and and inflict harm to the one group that's actively working against racism in the gay community by, literally, making love, not war. It drags down the dialogue about race to the level of America's right.

That dialogue is now so dysfunctional - and so dominated by hate filled bigots - that moderate voices can't be heard; white men are always just "seeking a Big Black Dick", and the black men who love them are always sick and in need of therapy. No doubt Kerney and his ilk advocate some sort of "cure" for black gay men who prefer white partners, you know, like the "gay reparative therapy" that's worked so well for no one ever. His article even suggests black gay men try other "men of color" if they just can't make it with a black dude.

What Kerney is telling black gay men who prefer white partners is that there's something fundamentally wrong with them, that they are broken, that their lives as they stand are worthless. Only when they abandon the path they have chosen will they be happy, fulfilled, worthy. What message does this send to mixed race gay men, or don't they matter? It tells them that they are a mistake, conceived as the result of a warped fetish. In this sense, Kerney is no different to the extreme right, to the evangelicals who tell gay men they are going to hell. They believe they have the right to tell others how to live their lives, and who to love. Kerney, too, believes he has that right.

America long ago legalised interracial marriage, but it seems like the law is playing catch up with hard hearts and poisoned minds. But there's a simple solution to gay men who don't like interracial relationships: Don't have one!

It's sad that MUSED and Viktor Kerney are so obsessed with interracial couples that they can't see that their hankering for racial segregation is part of the past. Men who date outside of their race - for whatever reason - are very much a part of the here, the now, and the future. It is they who are pushing that dialogue on race forward, whilst MUSED and Viktor Kerney seek to keep it mired in the past.

And in answer to the first MUSED article I mentioned, here's one from the superior Cypher Avenue site: These 14 Popular Black Gay Couples Shut Down All Bitter Black Gay Critics of Interracial Relationships.