This Gathering of Leaders 2014 session provided insight into how generational shifts might complicate contemporary thinking of masculinity, and offered examples of successful initiatives rooted in an expanded understanding of masculinity.
Expanding Understanding of Masculinity as a Tool to Build Opportunity Structures for Boys and Men of Color
1. Expanding Understanding of Masculinity
as a Tool to Build Opportunity Structures
for Young Men of Color
Juan Gomez
Consultant
National Compadres Network
Vincent Jones
CEO + Chief Strategist
Reinvent
Communications
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8. QUICK POLL: How many of you know what
gender non-conforming means? Text 163738 to
22333if YES. Text 163739 to 22333 if NO.
9. QUICK QUESTION: How would your organization
define masculinity? Text 166784 and your
response to 22333.
10. Gender conformity can be defined most simply as
behavior and appearance that conforms to the
social expectations for one’s gender. Gender
non-conformity, then, is behaving and appearing
in ways that are considered atypical for one’s
gender.
Gender nonconforming people are often
assumed to also be lesbian, gay, or bisexual, while
gender conforming people are assumed to be
heterosexual. This is NOT always the case.
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12. THREE out of FOUR students bullied
for perceived sexual orientation are
NOT identified as lesbian, gay,
bisexual, or transgender.
13. FOUR out of FIVE lesbian, gay,
bisexual, or transgender (LGBT)
students report not knowing ANY
supportive adults at their school.
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18. QUICK POLL: Does your BMoC program/initiative
intentionally address sexual orientation or gender
expression? Text 163757 to 22333 if YES. Text
163763 to 22333 if NO.
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23. QUICK POLL: Do you work with a gender justice
or LGBT organization as part of your BMoC work?
Text 163742 to 22333 if YES. Text 163744 to
22333 if NO.
VINCENT
Thank you for joining us today. Before we begin, we’d like to ask everyone to stand up, scan the room for someone you don’t know, and then pair up with them. (pause) Now Juan is passing out some profiles to each duo. We’d like for you to take a few moments to look at the picture. Then share with each other how the picture speaks to the BMoC work you’re connected to OR that you are aware of. It doesn’t have to be literal. It could be that something in the picture reminds you of a program you’ve been working to advance or a campaign you’ve been part of. But it could be literal as well. Make sense? You have 5 minutes. Starting now.
JUAN
(1) Who’d like to share how the picture they’ve been given connects to their BMoC work? What about the picture stuck out to you most?
(2) Anyone else want to share?
(3) Did anyone have any aha moment they’d like to share?
(4) Does anyone know any of the people in these pictures?
VINCENT
Would it surprise you that every single one of these people is a person who doesn’t conform to traditional views of masculinity?
For instance, this is Yordy Cancino. Yordy is one of many undocumented youth leading Gay Straight Alliance clubs and making schools safer across the country. As Gay-Straight Alliance club president at his Los Angeles high school, Yordy worked to transform his community in California, where he has lived since he was a child. Recently he was detained by ICE. After months of advocacy by thousands of immigrant and LGBT youth, Gay-Straight Alliance leader Yordy Cancino was released on June 6th.
This is Alexander D’Leon and Geoffrey Winder. Alex is a member of the Labor/Community Strategy Center, was a student leader in the Brothers, Sons, Selves Coalition, and is now a staff organizer with the Gay Straight Alliance Network. While a student at Manual Arts High School, Alex organized to get LAUSD Board members to vote in favor of the School Climate Bill of Rights as part of the Brothers, Sons, Selves Coalition. Geoffrey is child of Black father and Vietnamese mother. He lives in San Francisco and is a Senior Manager, Racial & Economic Justice Programs at GSA Network where he has built a GSAs for Justice movement that is ensuring the needs of LGBTQ low-income youth of color are represented in national school reform efforts.
This is Johnny Rodriguez. He is part of the Every Student Matters campaign in Long Beach.
This is….oh wait..that’s me. I run a social impact agency called Reinvent Communications. We partner with foundations, companies, and leaders. We leverage communications to harness the power of relationships to advance lasting social change. We partner with Liberty Hill Foundation to manage the Brothers, Sons, Selves Coalition, the California Community Foundation to manage their BLOOM initiative, and the California Endowment to lead their Sons and Brothers work to advance positive school discipline and restorative justice. It’s ironic that I’m involved in all of this work to reform school suspension policy because as a 5th grader, I was expelled from the Inglewood Unified School District for willful defiance.
In this picture, you have Kordell and Kaleb who caused an uproar in social media earlier this year when they posted this pic of their morning routine on Instagram. A young Black gay couple in the bathroom getting two of their children ready for school.
All of the men in these pictures express masculinity in different ways. All of us are people of color. All of us are part of the boys and men of color movement. Some have been organizing to advance alternatives to positive discipline policies, reform our country’s broken immigration system, reduce crime and criminalization in our communities, increase opportunities for employment and entrepreneurship, advance marriage equality for all couples regardless of gender, and more. Others are using the media to challenge the view of who men of color are and can be. And while this presentation will focus a lot on gay, bi, and transgender men of color, heterosexual men and boys who don’t express their gender in ways that conform with society’s current view are impacted by our ability or inability to expand our view of masculinity.
Ok, now we’re going to get fancy. Pull out your phones. We’re going to do an anonymous live poll. INSTRUCTIONS FOR HOW TO TAKE POLL. Then, pause. Ok, here are the results.
And one more.
And here is the definition.
Dennis Rodman is perhaps the most known example of a heterosexual male who defies modern ideas of gender expression. He dresses in drag, colors his hair, has no issue wearing clothes typical of women, and is generally considered flamboyant. He’s also wealthy, 6’7” and 220 lbs. Imagine being a freshman boy in high school in a rural community with lots of gang activity and heavy pressure to “look hard” and “man up” and being like Dennis Rodman. The experience of that young man might be much different.
In fact, the experience of heterosexual non-gender conforming youth is one that is often ignored yet research indicates that they are the lion’s share of young people bullied at school. And what’s the impact of this. Students who had experienced anti-gay harassment are four times more likely than non-harassed youth to be threatened with or injured by a weapon. Imagine what that does to a child. For those children who are LGBT, many of them deal skip school due to safety concerns.
When you consider that four out of five LGBT students report that they know NO supportive adult at their school, it seems logical that LGBT students are three times more likely to drop out of school. This matters because this is the reality for the young men whose outcomes we are trying to improve. It is easy for many people to discount the need to broaden our view of masculinity out of the belief that it applies only to gay, bisexual, and transgender people and there are “no gay, bisexual, or transgender people in their programs” or the young men aren’t ready for that or the community isn’t ready to talk about it.
But here’s the reality. Society is not changing. Society HAS changed. Young men of color who don’t look gay to you…Are gay, bisexual, or transgender. This is Michael Sam. The first openly gay person to be signed to a professional sports team.
This is Michael Sam celebrating the news that he’d been drafted by the Rams the way many other new draftees do: by kissing his partner. ESPN had cameras on him as he, his boyfriend, and his friends waited anxiously to hear If he’d been drafted. This tender moment was carried live on ESPN and created an uproar.
TIMES HAVE CHANGED.
In fact, younger generations of gay men and women don’t feel obligated to define themselves by their sexual identity, helping to make homosexuality part of mainstream culture, rather than a culture apart. Millennials’ generational attitude towards homosexuality supports equality and acceptance. 64% of Millennials believe gay marriage should be legal, and 64% of high school gay youth are out at school. At the same time, all millennial men are viewing themselves and their role differently than their parents. Despite the changes in our society, many BMoC initiatives seem to be rooted in an outdated sense of reality as it pertains to definitions of masculinity.
Take criminal justice efforts, for example. Sadly, many of us are used to seeing men of color in correctional facilities. But look closer. All of the men in this picture are gay, bisexual, or transgender and are housed in a unit in the LA County Jail specifically set up to house gay, bisexual, or transgender men for their safety. Given that LGBT youth are estimated to be about 40% of homeless youth in this country and drop out of school at high rates, most research and anecdotal evidence suggests that LGBT people are overrepresented in prisons and jails. With people of color, especially Black men, are overrepresented in the prison industrial complex, it stands to reason that gay, bisexual, or transgender men of color – a subgroup of the same population we are gathered here to support – are falling through the cracks. Yet, most efforts aimed at reentry populations or criminal justice reform seem to ignore gender non-conforming populations. Popular culture treats gender nonconforming inmates as punch lines in jokes.
But when efforts do account for the broader spectrum of masculinity, everyone benefits. Take the efforts to make condoms available in jails and prisons led by the Center for Health Justice. It began in the very unit that the men in this picture are housed in. But I think it’s safe to say that sex is happening all throughout the system to varying degrees. Efforts rooted in traditional views of masculinity would avoid this issue because “men don’t have sex with men” right? But not providing condoms to inmates is one of the reasons that rates of HIV among incarcerated men are more than double that of their non-incarcerated counterparts.
This is but one example of why it’s important to root your BMoC efforts in an expanded view of masculinity in order to be truly effective at building opportunity structures for men of color.
Ok, pull out your phones again? Time for another poll.
Here is one example of a BMoC campaign that is winning, in part, because we intentionally address sexual orientation and gender expression. The Brothers, Sons, Selves Coalition or BSS Coalition for short.
Ok, pull out your phones again? Time for another poll.
The BSS Coalition is comprised of 12 organizations from around LA County. All of the orgs organize or serve young people in communities of color. From the beginning, we included a gender justice organization and a LGBT organization in the coalition. Doing this ensured that from day one, we were thinking about masculinity in different ways. It also created spaces for staff members of all organizations to learn from peers and for gender non-conforming youth leaders in other organizations to feel comfortable being who they are and knowing that they’d be in safe, supportive environment.
And that has helped to win. It helped the Coalition and its youth and adult members feel bonded to each other and the change they sought despite the difficulties of building a diverse county-wide coalition. It also helped groups to understand that the system change we sought MUST speak to the nuanced realities of young men of color. That’s why the School Climate Bill of Rights that we won in LAUSD called for increased data collection to provide greater understanding for the experience of LGBT youth in schools. In fact, this demand was not only heard in LAUSD but in Washington, DC and now the Department of Education is collecting data of this type.
Ok, pull out your phones again? Time for another poll.
