Where do homosexuals and women of color fit into the picture?
Well, they are the impure ones. If some of us are pure and innocent, then the rest of us are dirty and bad. Certainly with women of color I’m not the first person to say this. It’s not a new idea that they’re so hypersexualized, that they’re never considered the virgin, that they’re never considered innocent. But I would argue that the same is true for queer women. They’re queer–they’re the “other” in that way. Any deviation from straight, vanilla, procreative sex is impure, dirty, wrong. That’s why I even think masturbation is seen as impure–because it’s not procreative, because it’s purely for pleasure, it’s bad. So lesbian sex, or gay male sex for that matter, is wrong, impure, dirty, bad. Which not only says terrible things about their homophobia and heteronormativity, but also says terrible things about what they think about sexual pleasure and its place in the world.
