What Barnes and Noble taught me about being black and gay

I've got electricity again!!!!!!!!!!

In light of recent events, my apartment's loss of electrical power for a night (albeit a very cold night) isn't a huge calamity.

It was a small inconvenience. But I hate inconveniences, whether they be large or small.

Now in order to keep abreast with what's going on during the outage, I went to an internet cafe in Barnes and Noble bookstore. After doing what I do, I browsed a bit to see if I wanted to buy anything.

Maybe I'm getting older but bookstores are starting to depress me. Or maybe it was today's sojourn through Barnes and Noble which has me down.

I learned two things today. President Obama is an evil disgusting demagogue who has curtailed our freedom and will lead us down the path of destruction to rival that of Dante's Inferno is he isn't stopped.

How do I know this? Why because of the myriad of books in the current events section which says so. Okay maybe I'm overstating this point but it seems to me that if this country is in such ugly straits, why are so many people free to make money off of telling us just how bad of a shape we're in?

If President Obama is really as evil as these books say that he is, shouldn't the authors be political prisoners? Shouldn't there be knocks at doors in the middle of the nights and disappearances which leave nothing but shoes on the side of lonely roads?

Only in America do we market speaking out against alleged tyrants.

I bet you that many of those authors voted for Obama and will probably do so again. After all, he is their bread and butter.

Now the other thing I learned is what I feel is a suitable metaphor between the division of the black and gay communities.

In Barnes and Noble, there is a section of books dedicated to African-Americans and there is another section dedicated to lgbts.

But as a black gay man, I couldn't identify with either because both left me out. That idea that somehow being black and gay are somehow separate (which also springs up in gay and black media)reared its ugly head.

Granted, the black section had one of those "Down Low" books, but let's be honest. Giving a black gay men a book on the "down low" is the equivalent of giving sewer water to a person dying of thirst.

It's interesting how both communities have people writing about the complexities of being black or being gay but no one ever wants to write about being black and gay.

Would a book like that sell? That's certainly another bit of food for thought.

And that is especially galling to me when I journeyed to the section on women's studies and saw books geared to lesbian and heterosexual women.

So I guess I learned today that despite all of our talk to the contrary, the invisible idea that being black and gay is somehow ingrained in some of us so-called progressive folks. And that's something which we can't completely blame anyone on the right.