• the217
• LGBT
• Race and the LGBT community

Related Media

Related Video

Related Venues

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Resources »
Address: Illini Union, Room 323, 1401 West Green Street Urbana, IL 61801
Phone: (217) 244-8863
Show on map

Related Articles

• Welcome back! Now get involved.
• The right kind of treatment
• A look Kurt Chandler's "Passages of Pride."

A roughly 40-minute video entitled, “Gay in America: Color Lines Across Rainbow Skies” takes a look at minorities in the LGBT community and the challenges they face across a racial and ethnic divide.

Created by user XemVanAdams, the video is an ambitious work for one person to take upon alone. One of my greatest praises of this video is just the sheer number of people the videographer interviews for the purposes of getting a representative cross-section of the LGBT community. He talks to white, black and Puerto Rican gay males as well as an interracial female couple raising children. The amount of interviewees gives his film some credibility in building his arguments.

That being said, I had a number of issues with the video. at times the videographer's style of interviewing seems to lead his subjects to the answers he wants. In addition, the videographer offeres so many problems without very many examples of how to solve them.

Furthermore, the editing was done so in a manner that much of the music was set to match the subject he was interviewing. For example, an interview with a Puerto Rican male was set to Latin music in the background. It may have been unintentional, but I feel it lessened the impact of parts of his video. He also interviewed a black male who made a number of stereotypical conclusions and comments. While this man’s views are his own, including the footage hurt not only the video, but also the voices of others in the LGBT community.

Overall, if the topics regarding the LGBT community are of concern or interest to you, this movie is definitely worth watching. The video is broken into four parts, and I recommend watching it in its entirety. It is a basic work trying to do something powerful for the LGBT community, if only with one video at a time.