A Burst of Light

by Audre Lorde

“The fact that millions of people take part in a delusion doesn’t make it sane.”

White men have been raised to believe that they’re God; most gay white men are marginal in only one respect. Much of the gay white movement seeks to be included in the American dream and is angered when they do not receive the standard white male privileges, misnamed as “American democracy.” Often, white gay men are working not to change the system. This is one of the reasons why the gay male movement is as white as it is. Black gay men recognize, again by the facts of survival, that being Black, they are not going to be included in the same way. The Black/white gay male division is being examined and explored by some. Recently, for instance, there was a meeting of Third World lesbians and gays in Washington. It was recognized that there are things we do not share with white lesbians and gay men, as well as things that we do, and that clarification of goals is necessary between white gays and lesbians, and Third World gays and lesbians. I see no essential battle between many gay men and the white male establishment. To be sure, there are gay men who do not view their oppressions as isolated, and who work for a future. But it is a matter of majority politics: many gay white males are being pulled by the same strings as other white men in this society. You do not get people to work against what they have identified as their basic self-interest.

Heterosexism—a belief in the inherent superiority of one form of loving over all others and thereby the right to dominance; Homophobia—a terror surrounding feelings of love for members of the same sex and thereby a hatred of those feelings in others. In the 1960s, when liberal white people decided that they didn’t want to appear racist, they wore dashikis, and danced Black, and ate Black, and even married Black, but they did not want to feel Black or think Black, so they never even questioned the textures of their daily living (why should flesh-colored Band-Aids always be pink?) and then they wondered, “Why are those Black folks always taking offense so easily at the least little thing? Some of our best friends are Black. . . .”

African-Americans can still walk the streets of America without passbooks—for the time being.

How is the systematic erosion of freedoms gradually accomplished? What kind of gradual erosion of our status as United States citizens will Black people be persuaded first to ignore and then to accept?

The whole spread reflected a dreamlike fullness of women sharing color and food and warmth and light

I may be too thin, but I can still dance!

The white women organizers’ defensiveness to any question of where the Black women were is rooted in that tiresome white guilt that serves neither us nor them.

I am learning to reduce stress in my practical everyday living. It’s nonsense, however, to believe that any Black woman who is living an informed life in America can possibly abolish stress totally from her life without becoming psychically deaf, mute, and blind. (News Item: Unidentified Black man found hanging from a

To acknowledge privilege is the first step in making it available for wider use. Each of us is blessed in some particular way, whether we recognize our blessings or not. And each one of us, somewhere in our lives, must clear a space within that blessing where she can call upon whatever resources are available to her in the name of something that must be done.