82

This article explores the Caribbean gay scene in Paris in order to explain how Black gay men of Martinican and Guadeloupean descent experience protean forms of domination linked with race, ethnicity and sexuality, both in their native islands and in the French capital. It also highlights the resistance strategies they use so as to affirm a particularly composite and labile sense of identity. This inquiry is based on an ethnographic study conducted in 2008-2009, among a group of friends who regularly went to gay clubs targeted at a clientele labeled as black (used as a neologism in French). The objective is to trace the trajectories of these men and to grasp the nature of the postcolonial context of migration in which they self-identified while building a gay black Caribbean network on both sides of the Atlantic. The notion of consubstantiality (rather than that of intersectionality) helps to explicate how relative intolerance towards LGBT people in the French Antilles and the peculiar process of racialization these men are subjected to in Paris shape the way in which they define themselves and negotiate more or less safe spaces while erecting barriers to differentiate themselves from racially or ethnically defined others.