HRC FamilyNet | How My Gay 'Brother' Helped Me to be a Better Man:I'll never forget walking to lunch with Bernhart Gearhardt Mingia. It wasn't unusual for women to stop and stare at him. Some would spin on their heels and say, right out loud, "Damn . . . he's fine." [...] He was a 6-foot-2 Ebony magazine cover: lean, athletic, caramel-colored, with thick and wavy black hair, a shiny black mustache, an easy and perfect smile. Bernhart was so magnetic to women, we nicknamed him "Heartburn." Besides those pretty-boy looks, he was charming and smart and funny and brutally honest - one of my best buddies at the paper. And he was gay.
     He was the first gay man I'd ever called a friend. And because I'd gotten to know him, I could no longer harbor the hideous stereotypes I was weaned on and had clung to most of my life. Knowing him forced me to reconsider everything I thought I knew about black manhood. It's because of Bernhart that I'm a recovering homophobe to this day. While I'm a long way from cured, our friendship laid bare my irrational fears and suspicions about gay men for the ugly lies they always were. .....
      ..... Bernhart could not have completely avoided discussing his sexuality in America, particularly not in black America, where the concept is riddled with tricky, often perilous cultural land mines. History has left black men with more questions than most about their racial and sexual identity. Some are warped and painful to acknowledge, others encouragingly profound.
     Are we Clifford Huxtable wannabes? Mandingo studs? Fearless freedom fighters? Emasculated and sometimes violent prisoners of racial circumstance? Icons of social conscience? Moet-swilling rappers? Zillionaire athletes? Absentee fathers? Up through slavery, the civil rights movement and the recent ascendance of the middle class, our collective experience has shown that black men can be anything they want - anything but gay.