SACRIFICED TO THE MYTH

Double Lives on the Down Low (BENOIT DENIZET-LEWIS, August 3, 2003, NY Times Magazine)

Today, while there are black men who are openly gay, it seems that the majority of those having sex with men still lead secret lives, products of a black culture that deems masculinity and fatherhood as a black man's primary responsibility -- and homosexuality as a white man's perversion. And while Flex now offers baskets of condoms and lubricant, Wallace says that many of the club's patrons still don't use them.

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. [...]

While William and many other DL men insist that they're strictly ''tops'' -- meaning they play the active, more stereotypically ''masculine'' role during sexual intercourse -- other DL guys proudly advertise themselves as ''masculine bottom brothas'' on their Internet profiles. They may play the stereotypically passive role during sex, they say, but they're just as much men, and just as aggressive, as DL tops. As one DL guy writes on his America Online profile, ''Just 'cause I am a bottom, don't take me for a bitch.''

Still, William says that many DL guys are in a never-ending search for the roughest, most masculine, ''straightest looking'' DL top. Both William and Christopher, who lost friends to AIDS, say they always use condoms. But as William explains: ''Part of the attraction to thugs is that they're careless and carefree. Putting on a condom doesn't fit in with that. A lot of DL guys aren't going to put on a condom, because that ruins the fantasy.'' It also shatters the denial -- stopping to put on a condom forces guys on the DL to acknowledge, on some level, that they're having sex with men. [...]

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.

For white people, Bell said, ''DL life fit in perfectly with our society's simultaneous obsession and aversion to black male sexuality.'' But if the old stereotypes of black sexual aggression were resurrected, there was a significant shift: this time, white women were not cast as the innocent victims. Now it was black women and children. The resulting permutations confounded just about everyone, black and white, straight and gay. How should guys on the DL be regarded? Whose responsibility are they? Are they gay, straight or bisexual? If they are gay, why don't they just tough it up, come out and move to a big-city gay neighborhood like so many other gay men and lesbians? If they are straight, what are they doing having sex with guys in parks and bathhouses? If they are bisexual, why not just say that? Why, as the C.D.C.
reported, are black men who have sex with men more than twice as likely to keep their sexual practices a secret than whites? Most important to many, why can't these black men at least get tested for H.I.V.?

It is certainly the case that black leaders themselves are to blame for ignoring this problem, but it's also important to note that AIDs activists and homosexuality advocates thought their cause was well served by downplaying the fact that what were being reported as instances of the heterosexual spread of AIDs were in fact a function of a gay subculture. It may never have been a conscious decision, but the import is the same: a generation of young black and Hispanic bisexuals and their quite possibly unwitting female partners were sacrificed in order that the public might be convinced that AIDS was a threat to everyone. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 5, 2003 7:54 PM