That Gay Thread

[The Architect Of Fate]

Yeah you totally didn't bring up the criminal element to colour the event yeah sure....And no they were after gay folks not blacks unless they were themselves gay

Oh and as for buck breaking 

First of all, who the hell are you quoting and why should I care for their opinion?

You quoted a meme and your scalding me for sources . But of course you can't offer up any actual objections to the post

Here's the second part

The reason why I particularly emphasise that for this answer is because our own use of these modern terms is imperfect, and that's especially significant for your question. Alfred Kinsey quite famously posited that sexual attraction works along to a spectrum, with a 7 point classification system for where individuals fell in that spectrum with 0 representing absolute heterosexuality and 6 representing absolute homosexuality. But our social construct of sexual orientation does not really accommodate that dynamic - you are straight, gay or bisexual. In Kinsey's language, as a society we say that you are either a 0, a 3 or a 6 - 1, 2, 4 and 5 have to pick a side. Someone who is a 1 by Kinsey's definition ("Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual") must identify either as 'straight' (which wrongly implies the total absence of same-sex attraction or activity) or 'bisexual' (which wrongly implies a state of equality in sexual attraction or activity), even though neither of these terms properly captures the lived experience of an individual who might feel they are a 1. And this is assuming Kinsey's scale is a good measure of sexual orientation - there are plenty of people (myself included) who feel Kinsey's terms are still too restrictive and broad, even though he gives us more than double the number of classifications we use in popular culture!
This is especially problematic because although they are intended and usually used as hallmarks of sexual orientation, terms like 'gay' and 'straight' also have a cultural implication of action. As labels for categorising other people, they essentially serve a function of allowing you to get quickly get a reference to shared cultural understandings about the characteristics and behaviour of other people - "X identifies as gay and a man; this means X is attracted to other men; therefore X only has sexual and romantic relations with men". The problem with how we categorise people according to a few narrow sexual orientations is that you can't really make that third leap, the leap of exclusivity in attraction or behaviour. People can, do and have throughout history engaged in sexual behaviour - both consensual and non-consensual - with sexes and genders to which they do not experience predominant or, indeed quite possibly, any attraction. Physical capacity for attraction does not necessarily determine willingness for engaging in sexual activity, which is affected by all manner of different social, cultural and other factors.
So when we see examples of male-on-male or female-on-female sexual abuse in the historical record, it is simply not possible for us to look back and attribute these things to the perpetrators being 'gay', especially in the context of slavery where the role of power assertion is especially significant. It would be anachronistic for us to impose that modern identity upon these individuals - they simply would not have identified as gay. The concept would have had no meaning to them in the same way it does today. If we were somehow able to deduce the complexities of their own sexual preferences and desires, it is simply not appropriate to make a judgement as to where they might have fallen in our modern, western understanding of the spectrum of sexuality because to them, that spectrum did not exist as it does to us. Even if it was appropriate for historians to put historical figures into modern groupings of sexual orientation, evidence for same sex activity between two individuals in the historical record is by no means sufficient for us to declare them gay - just as evidence for opposite sex activity is not enough for us to declare someone straight. These are imperfect and modern concepts, and they are best left out of historical discussions concerning the lives of people who lived long before they became part of our cultural fabric.
One thing that did strike me in trying to find the variations on this meme is that they nearly all make a point of emphasising (some more than others) homosexuality or gayness in their descriptions. It rather feels to me that there is a presumption being made in the dissemination of this myth that this is somehow a particular and uniquely awful crime beyond the sexual exploitation of black women, and this presumption is not rooted in an appreciation of the historical dynamics of sexual and gender roles, but rather a disapproval of same-sex behaviour in general. There's little doubt in my mind that this particular myth has been constructed and disseminated with homophobic thinking and intentions colouring it. It invokes certain stereotypes of modern gay people being predatory and sexually violent, particularly the longer varieties of the myth that appear on some websites.
In conclusion then, yes, the meme you have encountered is largely fictionalised. Whilst the sexual exploitation of male slaves by white men and women alike was absolutely a real thing, as was the use of ritualised public humiliation and violence as a means of dehumanisation and asserting control, the exact phenomena this article describes strikes me as being quite fanciful. It is doubtlessly circulated with an ulterior motive and an agenda in mind, one that is probably tinged with homophobic sentiments. There is no shortage of very real trauma in the historical record when it comes to slavery - these real people who suffered so much injustice do not need to have, nor do they deserve to be demeaned by, us inventing more. We should likewise be careful not to impose our own modern ways of thinking onto the people of the past, for similar reasons - as historians we must try to understand these people somewhat as they understood themselves. Our own ideas about which boxes people should be placed into aren't very useful for doing that.
By which of a few quick-fire reading recommendations and sources for this:

• Thomas Foster, "The Sexual Abuse of Black Men Under American Slavery", Journal of the History of Sexuality (2011): 445 - 464.
  
  
• Thomas Foster, Long before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America (mainly John Salliant, "The Black Body Erotic and the Republican Body Politic").
  
  
• Fay Yarborough, "Power, Perception, and Interracial Sex: Former Slaves Recall a Multiracial South", The Journal of Southern History 71, no. 3 (2005): 559 - 588.
  
  
• Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo Jamaican World (2004).
  
  
• Taking a glance back at Foster leads me to also believe William Benemann, Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendship (2006) might be of interest, though I've not read it myself.
  

And for more general reading recommendations on the theme of gender, sexuality and gendered resistance in slavery, although most of these are about women rather than men:

• Rhoda Reddock, Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analyses (2004) - chapter 8 (Hilary Beckles) mainly.
  
  
• Hilary Beckles, Centering Women: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society (1999).
  
  
• Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society 1650 - 1838 (1990).
  
  
• Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004).
  
  
• Marie Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (2006).
  
  
• Daina Berry, "Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe": Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (2007).
  
  
• Jennifer Morgan, Labouring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004).
  
  
• Renee Harrison, Enslaved Women and the Art of Resistance in Antebellum America (2009).