A new book from UC Santa Barbara sociologist Terrell J.A. Winder is challenging one of the most persistent habits in media, public health, and even academic research: talking about Black gay men mostly through risk, shame, illness, or survival. Shameless: The Making of Black Gay Identities in LA, published by NYU Press in June 2026, turns the focus toward agency, pride, kinship, and the everyday ways young Black queer men build identities that refuse to be defined by stigma.

The book is based on years of ethnographic research in Los Angeles, including observations with more than 200 young men in a community health organization, interviews with self-identified Black queer men, observations with gay kinship families, and media analysis. The result is not a narrow study of hardship. It is a fuller portrait of how Black gay men learn to understand themselves, care for one another, and turn identities that society often marks as vulnerable into sources of confidence and belonging.

For gay.us readers, that distinction matters. LGBTQ media has a responsibility not only to report on discrimination and violence, but also to document joy, intelligence, cultural invention, and the strategies queer people use to live fully. Winder’s book arrives as a reminder that visibility is not just about being seen. It is about being seen accurately.

What Happened

Noozhawk and UC Santa Barbara’s news site The Current spotlighted Winder’s new book as Pride Month 2026 came to a close. The article introduced Winder as a Baltimore native, Columbia University graduate, UCLA-trained sociologist, and UC Santa Barbara faculty member whose research focuses on race, sexuality, identity formation, urban life, and stigma.

Winder told UCSB that the seed of the book came while he was a graduate student at UCLA. He was studying Black gay and queer populations, but he often encountered an assumption that his work must be primarily about HIV. That response reflected a larger pattern: Black gay men are too often treated as public health subjects before they are treated as whole people.

“It was important to me to highlight the ways that young Black gay men were learning to navigate these types of stigmas associated with their racial and sexual identities in everyday life,” Winder told UC Santa Barbara.

That framing became the heart of Shameless. The book asks how young Black gay men in Los Angeles learn to reject the burden of stigma, not simply how they endure it. Instead of centering shame as a permanent condition, Winder examines how people cultivate pride, confidence, family, and community while navigating anti-Blackness, homophobia, HIV stigma, and narrow expectations of masculinity.

What the Book Is About

NYU Press describes Shameless as an in-depth exploration of how young Black queer men in Los Angeles come together to navigate racial and sexual stigma in everyday interactions. The book examines how traditional strategies such as passing and covering can become ineffective for Black gay men dealing with multiple stigmas at the same time.

In plain language, the book is about what happens when hiding is not enough, shrinking is not enough, and respectability is not liberation. Winder looks at how Black gay men create other tools: friendship, chosen family, community organizations, humor, style, shared language, sexual self-knowledge, and political clarity.

That approach pushes back against the idea that stigma is only something done to people. Stigma is also something people answer, reinterpret, and sometimes refuse. Shameless is especially interested in that refusal.

Winder’s official website describes the book as a study of how young Black queer men in Los Angeles transform stigma into pride and collective belonging. It also situates his scholarship at the intersection of Black studies, queer studies, public health, and urban sociology.

Why Los Angeles Matters

One of the useful insights in Winder’s interview with UCSB is that geography matters. He grew up in Baltimore, a historically Black city without the same kind of nationally recognized gayborhood as Los Angeles. In L.A., he saw a different landscape: a massive metropolitan region with more visible LGBTQ organizations and cultural resources, but also a sprawling geography that can be difficult to navigate.

Los Angeles has West Hollywood, one of the most recognizable LGBTQ neighborhoods in the country. But Winder’s work also asks what that visibility means for Black gay men specifically. A famous gay neighborhood is not automatically a Black gay home. Access, race, class, transportation, gentrification, and cultural belonging all shape who feels seen and who feels like a visitor.

That is why Shameless is not only a book about identity. It is also a book about place. Where someone grows up, where they find friends, which neighborhoods feel safe, which organizations offer support, and which spaces feel coded as white, Black, gay, straight, middle-class, religious, sexual, or respectable all affect how identity is formed.

Why It Matters

The book lands in a cultural moment when Black LGBTQ stories remain both hypervisible and underdeveloped. Black queer people often appear in mainstream coverage during crises: HIV disparities, anti-LGBTQ violence, homelessness, mental health emergencies, family rejection, or political attacks. Those issues are real and urgent. But if they are the only stories told, they can flatten Black gay life into a permanent emergency.

Winder’s work does not deny stigma. It argues that stigma is not the whole story. That matters because public narratives shape public policy, philanthropy, healthcare, dating, community programming, and self-image. If Black gay men are only discussed as “at risk,” institutions may miss the forms of creativity and care that already exist in their communities.

NYU Press’s praise page includes endorsements from scholars including Karida L. Brown, Mignon R. Moore, Anthony Christian Ocampo, Marlon M. Bailey, Jeffrey Q. McCune, and Juan Battle. Across those responses, the common theme is that Shameless offers a language of agency rather than deficit. It treats Black gay men not as problems to be solved, but as thinkers, organizers, lovers, friends, sons, and community-makers.

The HIV Context — And Why Winder Pushes Beyond It

It is impossible to discuss Black gay men in American public health without acknowledging HIV. CDC data continues to show major disparities among gay and bisexual men by race and ethnicity, including gaps in prevention, care, and outcomes. Those disparities require serious attention, funding, culturally competent healthcare, and structural change.

But Winder’s starting point is important: too often, the presence of HIV disparities causes outsiders to assume that research on Black gay men must be about HIV first. That assumption can become its own form of stigma. It can reduce Black gay men to risk categories and obscure the broader social worlds in which they live.

Shameless does not ask readers to ignore public health. It asks them to widen the lens. A Black gay man’s life is not only a prevention campaign, a clinic intake form, a dating-app disclosure, or a statistic. It is also style, ambition, family, friendship, faith, sex, work, laughter, grief, beauty, and self-invention.

Visibility, Survival, and Joseph Beam

One of the most striking moments in Winder’s UCSB interview comes when he discusses what he hopes the book will do. He refers to a line from the late Black gay writer and activist Joseph Beam: “Visibility is survival.”

Beam, who edited the landmark 1986 anthology In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, remains one of the most important figures in Black gay literary and activist history. His work insisted that Black gay men needed to speak for themselves, build their own archives, and refuse erasure from both Black and gay public life.

Winder’s book belongs to that lineage. By documenting the lives of young Black gay men in Los Angeles, Shameless adds to the research record. That may sound academic, but it has real-world meaning. Archives decide what future generations can know. Research decides what institutions measure. Books decide whose lives are considered worthy of interpretation.

Visibility is survival.

In the context of Shameless, that phrase does not mean visibility as performance or branding. It means evidence. It means refusing to let Black queer life disappear from scholarship, policy, media, and memory.

Book Events and Public Reception

The book has already moved beyond the page. NYU Press listed a June 9 book launch at Reparations Club in Los Angeles, where Winder appeared in conversation with actor and writer Darryl Stephens. Stephens is widely known to LGBTQ audiences for his work in Noah’s Arc, Boy Culture, and other queer-centered projects, making the launch a natural bridge between scholarship and Black gay cultural production.

Winder also appeared on the Gettin’ Grown podcast episode “Shameless,” released June 16, where the discussion focused on intersectional identity, stigma, and stigma response among Black gay men. That conversation helps make the book accessible beyond academic audiences, which is especially important for a project about communities that have too often been studied without being spoken to directly.

Upcoming events also show how the book is being positioned within larger conversations about queer space and identity. NYU Press lists an August 9 event in New York with Winder and sociologist Theo Greene at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, focused on Black queer placemaking, belonging, and shifting gay geographies. UCSB also notes that Winder is scheduled to appear August 18 at Chaucer’s Books in Santa Barbara in conversation with Jane Ward, professor and chair of UCSB’s Department of Feminist Studies.

Timeline

  • 2017: Winder receives his Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA, according to NYU Press event materials and UCSB’s faculty profile.
  • 2019: Winder joins UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Sociology.
  • June 9, 2026: Shameless is published by NYU Press and launched at Reparations Club in Los Angeles.
  • June 16, 2026: Winder appears on the Gettin’ Grown podcast episode “Shameless.”
  • June 26, 2026: UC Santa Barbara’s The Current publishes its Pride Month interview with Winder.
  • July 4, 2026: Noozhawk republishes the UCSB feature for Santa Barbara readers.
  • August 9, 2026: Winder is scheduled for a New York conversation with Theo Greene on Black queer placemaking.
  • August 18, 2026: Winder is scheduled to appear at Chaucer’s Books in Santa Barbara with Jane Ward.

LGBTQ Context

Shameless also arrives at a time when LGBTQ communities are rethinking what Pride is supposed to do. Visibility has expanded dramatically in some spaces, but that visibility has not been evenly distributed. Black queer people, trans people, low-income LGBTQ people, immigrants, disabled queer people, and people living with HIV still often encounter a version of Pride that celebrates them symbolically while failing to center their realities.

Winder told UCSB that public Pride celebrations can be so visible now that people sometimes forget not everyone begins from a place of pride or acceptance. That observation is especially important for young Black gay men who may be navigating family expectations, religious traditions, masculinity norms, racism in gay spaces, homophobia in Black spaces, and economic barriers all at once.

The Trevor Project’s research on Black LGBTQ youth has also shown high levels of discrimination, mental health stress, and unmet need for care. While Winder’s book focuses on young Black gay men in Los Angeles rather than LGBTQ youth nationally, the broader pattern is clear: identity does not develop in a vacuum. People need communities, language, models, and spaces where they can move from survival to self-recognition.

What Happens Next

The next phase for Shameless will likely be both academic and cultural. In universities, the book is positioned for courses in sociology, Black studies, queer studies, gender and sexuality, public health, and urban studies. In community spaces, it may help Black queer readers name experiences that have often been discussed around them rather than with them.

For LGBTQ media, the book offers a challenge: cover Black gay men as people with agency, not just as symbols of crisis. That does not mean avoiding hard stories. It means telling fuller ones. It means writing about health without reducing people to diagnoses, writing about stigma without making shame the main character, and writing about Black queer life as a site of knowledge.

The title Shameless is not just provocative. It is a political and emotional claim. It insists that pride is not a decoration placed on top of pain. Pride can be a practice, a method, and a refusal. For Black gay men whose lives have too often been narrated by others, that refusal is powerful.

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