The term quickly became conflated with an eroticism of Black and Latino homosexual activity. In "Power Plays, Power Works" John Fiske suggests that closeted homosexuality may be more common in American communities suffering from widespread poverty, in which members reportedly depend heavily on traditional family networks (and often religious institutions) for financial and emotional support. In his book Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies and Denial in Black America, Keith Boykin states that secret homosexual relations are not unique to African American men, and in fact occur in many societies and among all races. To them, as to many blacks, that equates to being inherently masculine. Most DL men identify themselves not as gay or bisexual but first and foremost as black. 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. Many of these men are young and from the inner city, where they live in a hypermasculine thug culture. Most date or marry women and engage sexually with men they meet only in anonymous settings like bathhouses and parks or through the Internet.
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. There have always been men – black and white – who have had secret sexual lives with men. 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. A 2003 cover story in The New York Times Magazine on the Down Low phenomenon explains that the Black community sees "homosexuality as a white man's perversion." It then goes on to describe the Down Low culture as follows: In this context, "being on the Down Low" is more than just men having sex with men in secret, or a variant of closeted homosexuality or bisexuality-it is a sexual identity that is, at least partly, defined by its "cult of masculinity" and its rejection of what is perceived as white culture (including white LGBT culture) and terms. Īccording to a study published in the Journal of Bisexuality, "he Down Low is a lifestyle predominately practiced by young, urban Black men who have sex with other men and women, yet do not identify as gay or bisexual".
Figuring out where and how to intervene is critical to addressing this disparity.The term originated in the Black community, and was originally used to describe "any kind of slick, secretive behavior, including infidelity in heterosexual relationships". “But now that it is higher, it’s perpetuating itself. “There are a lot of theories-poverty, discrimination, stigma, racial segregation of inner cities, other health disparities-about why HIV prevalence is higher among African-American gay and bisexual men,” he says. But with a new four-year grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a supplemental grant from the Johns Hopkins University Center for AIDS Research, he is now zeroing in on how and where HIV transmission is occurring and how to most effectively intervene, including on social media. “And as a black gay man, I recognized the impact of this disparity on my community.”įields has authored or presented nearly 20 papers on gay black adolescent male attitudes and behaviors. from the Bloomberg School of Public Health. at The Johns Hopkins University and his Ph.D. “Growing up in rural South Carolina, I’d always wanted to have an impact on racial disparities in health,” says Fields, who in 2009 earned his M.D. Though young black gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men are no more likely to engage in high-risk behaviors than their white, Latino and Asian peers, they are at a significantly higher risk for HIV. When Fields started doing HIV research, he was struck by a startling disparity. “We want to know how to reach people in these virtual spaces to educate them about prevention, get them tested, get them on PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) or, if necessary, treat them for HIV.” “For young people, social network apps are often their first introduction and access to the gay community,” says pediatrician Errol Fields, whose research has shown that mobile apps have become more popular than clubs for meeting other gay men among the youth he studies. Smartphone apps could be a powerful new tool for reaching out to young black gay men at risk of contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.