Sex, Stigma, and the Holy Ghost: The Black Church and the Construction of AIDS in New York City

This article examines the difficulties that a group of Black churches in New York City have had in addressing HIV/AIDS and how these challenges were overcome. This article argues that the way the Black Church responded to AIDS is a result of its unique social history and its inability to address sexuality. This study uses in-depth interviews with 28 New York City Black Church leaders, AIDS activists, and employees at an AIDS service non-profit that work exclusively with Black churches. The data show that this sample of Black churches initially had trouble confronting AIDS in Black communities because they were unable to confront homosexuality and sexuality. The data also reveal that when AIDS awareness organizations become aware of how Black churches perceive sexuality as it relates to AIDS, then they will be able to create effective AIDS awareness material for the Black Church

Conflicts Within the Black Churches

This essay examines conflicts concerning sex, sexuality, and gender within Black churches. Black churches are American Protestant churches with a predominantly Black leadership and congregation. Often serving the oppressed and underprivileged, Black churches have a history not only of providing for the spiritual needs of Black Americans, but also of fighting for social justice. Increasingly, controversies have begun to emerge within these churches, about gender equality, HIV/AIDS and safer sex education, and, perhaps the most controversial, about homosexuality and same-sex marriage. This essay discusses how Black churches have responded to these issues and the impact that HIV/AIDS has had on this response. Additionally, examples of the role of women and sexual minorities in Black church denominations and congregations will be provided

Creating Racial Identities Through Film: A Queer and Gendered Analysis of Blaxploitation Films

This paper examines how racialized knowledge is reproduced through film. Through an analysis of twenty blaxploitation films, this paper examines how gendered and sexualized discourses are used to shape Black identity. Discussed are the two typologies of queer images found within these films, the jester and the scoundrel, and how these images are used to frame Black identities. Consequently, we argue that queer images in blaxploitation films contribute to how racialized knowledge is produced

Connectedness and the Sociopolitical Involvement of Same-Gender-Loving Black Men

Employing a national sample of over 800 same-gender-loving black men, we explore the relative impact of community-level support/comfort and the importance of sexual orientation and racial identity on two dependent variables—sociopolitical involvement within lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities and sociopolitical involvement within people of color (POC) communities. Findings indicate that feelings of connectedness to LBGT communities is the most important predictor of sociopolitical involvement within both LGBT and POC communities; while, counterintuitively, being comfortable within the LGBT community had a negative impact on the sociopolitical involvement of these men. Further, the impact of the importance of identity was negligible

Lesbians and Tech: Analyzing Digital Media Technologies and Lesbian Experience

The rise of the popular Internet has coincided with the increasing acceptance, even assimilation, of lesbians into mainstream society. The visible presence of lesbians in the tech industry and in digitally mediated spaces raises a set of questions about the relationship between queer identities and Internet technologies. This introduction to a special issue of Journal of Lesbian Studies explores some of these questions and provides an overview of the articles that follow