The Persistent Challenge of HIV and Black MSM in the American South: Racial Inequality and the LGBTQ Community

Abstract

The lived experience of HIV+ Black MSM (men who have sex with men) in the South exposes persistent racialized inequality. With the highest rates of HIV diagnosis in the country, Black MSM are made to feel unequal within the US LGBTQ community, thereby perpetuating long-standing inequalities between the groups. We argue that Whites' and Blacks' differing conceptions of racial equality serve to limit the extent to which comprehensive LGBTQ equality is possible as whiteness frames the LGBTQ experience in the United States. Examining how the country's racist story of nonaccess, representation, and exclusion has stymied coalition building to eliminate inequalities, findings reveal the structural impediments toward racial parity. Utilizing the case study of HIV+ Black MSM in the South, we examine the persistence of inequality amid the thrice interwoven intramarginalization of feeling excluded from sociopolitical spaces, having limited political representation, and engaging with racist body politics.