1) The document discusses how whiteness is central to mainstream gay identity and politics, as gay is often assumed to mean white and well-off. 2) Issues like homelessness, unemployment, and health care that affect the broader LGBTQ community have been isolated from mainstream gay rights agenda. 3) Even racially comfortable gay spaces and relationships are lived through and impacted by race, whether acknowledged or not, and mainstream white gay culture and politics are about race.

1. How Gay Stays White and What Kind of White it Stays Alain B érubé

2. “ Whenever I get to the social category “gay man”, the student’s response is always the same: “white and well-to-do” -pg 234

3. “ What emerged was too often an exclusively gay rights agenda isolated from supposedly non-gay issues; such as homelessness, unemployment, welfare, universal health care, union organizing, affirmative action and abortion rights.” - Pg 235

4. “ Such racially comfortable, racially familiar situations can make us mistakenly believe that there are such things as gay issues, spaces, culture, and relationships that are not ‘lived through’ race, and that white gay life, so long as it is not named as such, is not about race.” - Pg 237

5. “ This practice was the selling of gay whiteness – the marketing of gays as white and wealthy to make money and increase political capital” - Pg 238

6. Lt. General Calvin Waller “I had no choice regarding my race when I was delivered from my mother’s womb.” General Colin Powell - race is a ‘benign characteristic’ while homosexuality is neither benign nor condoned by most Americans. - Pg 240

7. “ During the race analogy debates, the fact that only white witnesses made the analogy, drawing connections between antigay and racial discrimination without including people of color, reduced the power of their argument and credibility.” - Pg 240

8. “ What would the gay movement look like if gay white men who use the race analogy took it more seriously?” - Pg 246

9. “ But a gay rights politics that is supposedly color-blind (and sex-neutral and classless) is in fact a politics of race (and gender and class).” - Pg 247

10. “ I believed that not talking about our whiteness was going to hurt our work. Instead of speaking up, however, I hesitated.” - Pg 249

11. “ That only by seeing and naming the whiteness I’m inhabiting, and taking responsibility for it, can I begin to change it and even do something constructive with it.” - Pg 249

12. “ It appears to me that everyone here is white. If this is true, I’d like to talk about how our whiteness may be connect to being HIV-negative, because I suspect there are political similarities between being in each of these positions of relative privilege” - Pg 251

13. “ I want to never forget that the roots of my antiracist desires and my gay desires are intertwined.” - Pg 259