Gay black gangsters
Home / gay topics / Gay black gangsters
Panfil provides an eye-opening portrait of how even members of straight gangs are connected to a same-sex oriented underground world.
So most stayed in the closet, continuing to project heterosexuality, while discreetly meeting other gay men in underground gay scenes or over the internet.
Some fought back even if they weren’t openly gay.
Although they viewed these norms with a critical eye, across the board they tended to prefer having “masculine” men as sexual partners or friends.
Fighting back
One of the most compelling findings of my study was what happened when these gay gang members were derisively called “fag” or “faggot” by straight men in bars, on buses, in schools or on the streets.
Most of these gangs were primarily male.
Because even the idea of a gay man being in a gang flies in the face of conventional thought, the gang members I spoke with had to constantly resist or subvert a range of stereotypes and expectations.
Getting in by being out
Male spaces can be difficult for women to enter, whether it’s boardrooms, legislative bodies or locker rooms.
How could I – a white, middle-class woman with no prior gang involvement – gain access to these gangs in the first place?
Giovanni is gay, and he is in love with another former member of the rival gang, Barrio 18.
The Gang’s All Queer draws from interviews with over 50 gay gang- and crime-involved young men in Columbus, Ohio, the majority of whom are men of color in their late teens and early twenties, as well as on-the-ground ethnographic fieldwork with men who are in gay, hybrid, and straight gangs.
Sure, the slur was explicitly meant to attack their masculinity and sexuality in ways they didn’t appreciate. In vivid detail, Panfil provides an in-depth understanding of how gay gang members construct and negotiate both masculine and gay identities through crime and gang membership… [From Amazon.com]
Publisher
New York University Press
Keywords
Gang members, Gay men, United States
Disciplines
Criminology and Criminal Justice | Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
Recommended Citation
Panfil, Vanessa R., "The Gang's All Queer: The Lives of Gay Gang Members" (2017).
It also communicated a belief that was clearly nonnegotiable: a fundamental right to not be bothered simply for being gay.
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — The meeting took place in a prison that is home and headquarters to the notorious and violent MS-13 street gang in El Salvador.
Pretty much none of those stereotypes overlap.
In vivid detail, Panfil provides an in-depth understanding of how gay gang members construct and negotiate both masculine and gay identities through crime and gang membership. That helped it get as far as the shortlist of the Oscars this year.
The film highlights the cruelty with which gays are treated by evangelical churches that initially embrace gang members inside the prisons, and a retrograde prison system, with a total ignorance of gender identity.
“There was a psychologist who, in an attempt to do a scientific test to identify if an inmate was gay or not, asked inmates if they liked poetry or plants,” recalls Martínez.
The survival of the inmates of El Zope relies on their staying there.
https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/sociology_criminaljustice_books/24
A couple of mid-level leaders – El Baxter and El Medias – at that meeting suspected that the gang member in question, El Fénix, was something unforgivable, according to the laws of the MS-13.
His rank was only below that of the Ranfla bosses.
To confirm their suspicions, El Baxter and El Medias even set a trap for El Fénix.
These comebacks challenge many of the assumptions made about gay men – that they lack nerve, that they’re unwilling to physically fight. How is it possible that these people feel free in a cell that is 3 ft by 5 ft?!
But this is the only space where they can be who they really are.
Some of the gang members were in gangs made up of primarily gay, lesbian or bisexual people.