. . . There are two bathhouses in Cleveland. On the city's predominantly white West Side, Club Cleveland -- which opened in 1965 and recently settled into a modern 15,000-square-foot space -- attracts many white and openly gay men. Flex is on the East Side, and it serves a mostly black and Hispanic clientele, many of whom don't consider themselves gay. (Flex recently shut its doors temporarily while it relocates.)
I go to Flex one night to meet Ricardo Wallace, an African-American outreach worker for the AIDS Task Force of Cleveland who comes here twice a month to test men for H.I.V. I eventually find him sitting alone on a twin-size bed in a small room on the main floor. Next to him on the bed are a dozen unopened condoms and several oral H.I.V.-testing kits. . . .
Wallace ticks off the grim statistics: blacks make up only 12 percent of the population in America, but they account for half of all new reported H.I.V. infections. While intravenous drug use is a large part of the problem, experts say that the leading cause of H.I.V. in black men is homosexual sex (some of which takes place in prison, where blacks disproportionately outnumber whites). According to the Centers for Disease Control, one-third of young urban black men who have sex with men in this country are H.I.V.-positive, and 90 percent of those are unaware of their infection.
We don't hear much about this aspect of the epidemic, mostly because the two communities most directly affected by it -- the black and gay communities -- have spent the better part of two decades eyeing each other through a haze of denial or studied disinterest. For African-Americans, facing and addressing the black AIDS crisis would require talking honestly and compassionately about homosexuality -- and that has proved remarkably difficult, whether it be in black churches, in black organizations or on inner-city playgrounds. The mainstream gay world, for its part, has spent 20 years largely fighting the epidemic among white, openly gay men, showing little sustained interest in reaching minorities who have sex with men and who refuse to call themselves gay.
Rejecting a gay culture they perceive as white and effeminate, many black men have settled on a new identity, with its own vocabulary and customs and its own name: Down Low. There have always been men -- black and white -- who have had secret sexual lives with men. But the creation of an organized, underground subculture largely made up of black men who otherwise live straight lives is a phenomenon of the last decade. Many of the men at Flex tonight -- and many of the black men I met these past months in Cleveland, Atlanta, Florida, New York and Boston -- are on the Down Low, or on the DL, as they more often call it. Most date or marry women and engage sexually with men they meet only in anonymous settings like bathhouses and parks or through the Internet. Many of these men are young and from the inner city, where they live in a hypermasculine ''thug'' culture. Other DL men form romantic relationships with men and may even be peripheral participants in mainstream gay culture, all unknown to their colleagues and families. Most DL men identify themselves not as gay or bisexual but first and foremost as black. To them, as to many blacks, that equates to being inherently masculine.
DL culture has grown, in recent years, out of the shadows and developed its own contemporary institutions, for those who know where to look: Web sites, Internet chat rooms, private parties and special nights at clubs. Over the same period, Down Low culture has come to the attention of alarmed public health officials, some of whom regard men on the DL as an infectious bridge spreading H.I.V. to unsuspecting wives and girlfriends. In 2001, almost two-thirds of women in the United States who found out they had AIDS were black. . . .
In 1992, E. Lynn Harris -- then an unknown black writer -- self-published ''Invisible Life,'' the fictional coming-of-age story of Raymond Tyler, a masculine young black man devoted to his girlfriend but consumed by his attraction to men. For Tyler, being black is hard enough; being black and gay seems a cruel and impossible proposition. Eventually picked up by a publisher, ''Invisible Life'' went on to sell nearly 500,000 copies, many purchased by black women shocked at the idea that black men who weren't effeminate could be having sex with men.
''I was surprised by the reaction to my book,'' Harris said. ''People were in such denial that black men could be doing this. Well, they were doing it then, and they're doing it now.''
That behavior has public health implications. A few years ago, the epidemiological data started rolling in, showing increasing numbers of black women who weren't IV drug users becoming infected with H.I.V. While some were no doubt infected by men who were using drugs, experts say many were most likely infected by men on the Down Low. Suddenly, says Chris Bell, a 29-year-old H.I.V.-positive black man from Chicago who often speaks at colleges about sexuality and AIDS, DL guys were being demonized. They became the ''modern version of the highly sexually dangerous, irresponsible black man who doesn't care about anyone and just wants to get off.'' Bell and others say that while black men had been dying of AIDS for years, it wasn't until ''innocent'' black women became infected that the black community bothered to notice. . . .
. . . The white community, the conventional wisdom goes, is more accepting of its sexual minorities, leading to fewer double lives, less shame and less unsafe sex. (AIDS researchers point to shame and stigma as two of the driving forces spreading AIDS in America.)
But some scholars have come to doubt the reading of black culture as intrinsically more homophobic than white culture. ''I think it's unfair to categorize it that way today, and it is absolutely not the case historically,'' says George Chauncey, the noted professor of gay and lesbian history at the University of Chicago. ''Especially in the 1940's and 50's, when anti-gay attitudes were at their peak in white American society, black society was much more accepting. People usually expected their gay friends and relatives to remain discreet, but even so, it was better than in white society.''
Glenn Ligon, a black visual artist who is openly gay, recalls that as a child coming of age in the 70's, he always felt there was a space in black culture for openly gay men. ''It was a limited space, but it was there,'' he says. ''After all, where else could we go? The white community wasn't that accepting of us. And the black community had to protect its own.''
Ligon, whose artwork often deals with sexuality and race, thinks that the pressure to keep homosexuality on the DL does not come exclusively from other black people, but also from the social and economic realities particular to black men. ''The reason that so many young black men aren't so cavalier about announcing their sexual orientation is because we need our families,'' he says. ''We need our families because of economic reasons, because of racism, because of a million reasons. It's the idea that black people have to stick together, and if there's the slightest possibility that coming out could disrupt that, guys won't do it.'' (That may help explain why many of the black men who are openly gay tend to be more educated, have more money and generally have a greater sense of security.) . . .
Though the issues being debated have life-and-death implications, the tenor of the debate owes much to the overcharged identity politics of the last two decades. As Chauncey points out, the assumption that anyone has to name their sexual behavior at all is relatively recent. ''A lot of people look at these DL guys and say they must really be gay, no matter what they say about themselves, but who's to know?'' he says. ''In the early 1900's, many men in immigrant and African-American working-class communities engaged in sex with other men without being stigmatized as queer. But it's hard for people to accept that something that seems so intimate and inborn to them as being gay or straight isn't universal.''
Whatever the case, most guys on the DL are well aware of the contempt with which their choices are viewed by many out gay men. And if there are some DL guys willing to take the risk -- to jeopardize their social and family standing by declaring their sexuality -- that contempt doesn't do much to convince them they'd ever really be welcome in Manhattan's Chelsea or on Fire Island. ''Mainstream gay culture has created an alternative to mainstream culture,'' says John Peterson, a professor of psychology at Georgia State University who specializes in AIDS research among black men, ''and many whites take advantage of that. They say, 'I will leave Podunk and I will go to the gay barrios of San Francisco and other cities, and I will go live there, be who I really am, and be part of the mainstream.' Many African-Americans say, 'I can't go and face the racism I will see there, and I can't create a functioning alternative society because I don't have the resources.' They're stuck.'' As Peterson, who says that the majority of black men who have sex with men are on the DL, boils it down, ''The choice becomes, do I want to be discriminated against at home for my sexuality, or do I want to move away and be discriminated against for my skin color?'' . . .
[The full text of the article is available at <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/magazine/03DOWNLOW.html>.] ***** -- Yoshie
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