After examining online personal ads and interviewing gay men, Robinson (2015) found that gay white men often exclude gay men of color as potential sexual partners while denying that their racial preferences are racist in nature.
Instead, these men argue that excluding gay men of color as potential sexual partners is a “personal preference,” rather than racial exclusion. In fact, several studies have shown that gay white men were much more likely to prefer their own race and actively exclude non-whites as potential sexual than gay men of color ( Lundquist and Lin 2015 Phau and Kaufman 2003 Rafalow, Feliciano, and Robnett 2017 Smith 2014).ĭespite gay white men’s insistence that sexual exclusion was not racism but rather personal preference, and that these personal preferences have nothing to do with racism, Collander and his colleagues (2015) found that attitudes toward sexual exclusion were related to almost every identified factor associated with racist attitudes in general. More importantly, the authors found that even gay white men who do not actively engage in acts of sexual exclusion were incredibly tolerant of racist behaviors from other gay white men who did.
