Something that caught my attention while looking at the transcripts from the archives was the lack of representation from people of color. This raised some questions from me: Why is there a lack of representation? Does it have to do with the history of people of color in this country? Does it tie into cultural and societal expectations? I wanted to know how these questions tied into the lack of representation of people of color in the archives. There is no doubt in my mind that there are people of color in the LGBTQ community (I follow a nice amount on Tumblr if that is any indication), so why so little in the archives? I don’t think it is the fault of the archives, but the fault in the society we happen to be in. I can only talk about my culture specifically, but from what I know of from experience, is the very high expectations of masculinity placed on black men. I have a younger brother and from what I remember, he was often told that he cried too much and that he needed to toughen up. The expectations on black men is to be hard, what I mean by that is to have little to no emotions and be able to handle every and any situation handed to him. Anything less than this, including being queer, warrants name calling and an unfortunate experience with bullies. From what I can understand being an East Asian Studies major (and from reading personal stories from Tumblr), there is almost a complete opposite effect in play. More often than not, Asian males are striped of their sexuality altogether, leaving a space where they can’t explore themselves. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t queer people of color, just that situations make it difficult for them to be out, which is why representation matters.