Welcome to the Communities of African Descent section. Here you will find resources to help you cover this specific community in a fair, accurate and inclusive way. These resources include reports, examples of balanced and unbalanced representations in the media and an essay on assumptions and attitudes that prevent the media from portraying the African American lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in a fair and balanced manner.

While media are covering the lives, stories and issues of LGBT people more frequently, Black LGBT voices, perspectives and opinions are too often left out of the picture. From the National Black Justice Coalition to the National Black AIDS Coalition to the Black elected officials across the country who are out and proud, Black LGBT people are making invaluable contributions that deserve to make headlines.

To bring greater visibility to LGBT communities of African descent, GLAAD's People of Color (POC) Media Program has been collaborating with LGBT African American organizations nationwide to eliminate stereotypes and to promote fair, accurate and inclusive representation of this community in all types of media. The program also provides media training sessions across the country to LGBT Black activists to encourage them to advocate for inclusive representation in the media.

The POC Media Program also works extensively with African American media professionals around the country in the following ways: suggesting and pitching story ideas to reporters and producers; providing referrals of spokespeople from this specific community; and offering relevant terminology and tips on how to cover LGBT communities of African descent in a fair and accurate manner. As part of these efforts, GLAAD has reached out to Black Entertainment Television (BET), several newspapers around the country, including the Amsterdam News, Los Angeles Sentinel, The Wave, and national magazines, such as Essence, Ebony, Vibe and The Source. GLAAD has also worked with Internet news sites, such as Blackpressusa.com.

In addition to working with media professionals, the program also does community outreach such as when it held a panel discussion with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at Fusion, OutFest's second annual LGBT People of Color film festival, in Los Angeles. The discussion, which took place after a screening of the acclaimed film Brother to Brother, focused on the film's historical depiction of queer cultural and artistic contributions to the Harlem Renaissance, the challenges facing out actors in Hollywood, and the need for NAACP support of media representations of LGBT people of African descent. Panelists included Vic Bulluck, the executive director of the NAACP's Hollywood Bureau who oversees the NAACP Image Awards, the film's writer/director Rodney Evans and co-stars Roger Robinson and Ray Ford, and Caroline Streeter, Ph.D., of UCLA's Department of African American Studies. Mónica Taher, GLAAD's People of Color Media Director, moderated the discussion.

In addition to the POC Media Program, GLAAD's other media programs (Entertainment, National and Regional) consistently call attention to the lack of African American LGBT images in mainstream media and promote their inclusion in every possible way.