The Down Low: New jargon, sensationalism, or agent of change?  

“Mounting anxiety about sexual encounters with high-risk partners spotlights hush-hush concern”
—subtitle of “The Hidden Fear: Black Women, Bisexuals and the AIDS Risk,” Ebony magazine, January 1988, by Laura Randolph

Long before being on the “down low” became part of the vernacular, Laura Randolph, a writer for Ebony, sought to illustrate the factually-based premise that Black women are unwittingly at risk of HIV through sexual relations with men who lead secret sexual lives with other men. To illustrate the point, Ms. Randolph provided an inaccurate account of how an HIV/AIDS prevention activist had placed Black women at risk. I was that activist.

It was clear to me and others, once the article was published, that Ms. Randolph needed an example of a man on the “downlow” (or “DL”) and that any Black man who admitted having sex with other men and with women would do. In my case, a nonsensational line of inquiry would have revealed that I was an unsuitable representative of what she had hoped to show in her article. In reality, I had engaged in vaginal sex nearly nine years prior to the emergence of the AIDS epidemic. The sexual exchange was with an Asian woman and it involved the use of condoms to prevent conception.

Fast forward to 2003 and 2004 and there is again media hype about an old issue, this time with a new hook—the term “down low.” Thankfully, the media no longer needs a substitute for the real subject of concern. J.L. King, author of On The Down Low: A Journey Into the Lives of “Straight” Black Men Who Sleep with Men, was not only willing to write about the issue from first-hand experience, but also willing to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2004. The subject title was “A Secret Sex World: Living on the ‘Down Low.’” Several major newspapers also featured men on the “DL,” including the New York Times Magazine, which ran an August 2003 cover story written by Benoit Denizet-Lewis entitled “Double Lives on the Down Low.”

Living on the “DL” is but one of several terms in a broader arsenal of code language that is in constant flux. The term serves to describe a specific sexual interest and shared sensibilities among individuals and groups in the Black community about male-to-male sexuality and about Black manhood. These sensibilities are, more often than not, distinct from sensibilities held by Black men and non-Black men who identify themselves as gay. Men on the “DL” may have sex with men, but they do not relate to the established gay community, and rather than coming out, they choose to keep their sexual activities private—in other words, on the “down low.”

The recent attention in the media to Black men on the “DL” suggests a new development in Black male behavior, and that this behavior differs essentially from behavior in other racial or ethnic groups. This current public discourse betrays a lack of knowledge of earlier treatment of the issue, leaving solutions to the HIV/AIDS epidemic among the African American population unexplored and unsupported. Culturally-grounded HIV-prevention models based on evidence of effectiveness in the Black community are lacking, and a deeper understanding of the factors that contribute to risk behavior in Black men and women is needed.

BEYOND THE TALK
In 1986, long before the term “DL” came into common use, one of the earliest efforts to address HIV/AIDS within the Black community was carried out by the now defunct National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays. NCBLG developed a nationally distributed HIV-prevention brochure that included the term “men who go both ways,” code language that had currency in some quarters of the Black community at the time, along with other terms such as “In the Life,” which is the title of Joseph Beam’s groundbreaking anthology of essays by black gay writers and artists, published in 1986. NCBLG and others engaged in HIV prevention incorporated these terms and other language into their work in recognition of the large community of Black men who would never identify with the word “gay” or with gay culture.

While it is important to examine changing jargon, the bigger issue, since the beginning of the epidemic, is that research to support effective HIV prevention in Blacks is sorely needed. In the midst of this media focus on the “DL,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) embarked in late 2003 on a new initiative to provide multiyear funding for community-based efforts to stop the spread of HIV. The CDC required that applicants for grants use one or more of the interventions included in the Procedural Guidance, which catalogued evidence-based intervention models that the CDC has endorsed as effective. For organizations interested in providing targeted outreach and health education/risk reduction to high-risk non-gay identified Black men, picking a model from the CDC menu was challenging. While the Procedural Guidance describes processes for adapting and tailoring models to meet the needs of specific populations, only one of the CDC models, Community Promise, was specifically described as having been tested among non-gay identified men who have sex with men. The paucity of CDC-endorsed models that have been researched and developed for use in the diverse groups of Black men at high risk for HIV infection or transmission is not surprising. In light of the need for more effective approaches, researchers are saying more study is needed. This need should enter into the public discourse to promote the development and dissemination of effective models.

In the February 2004 issue of the Journal of Black Psychology, Vickie Mays, Susan Cochran, and Anthony Zamudio call for a renewal in public funding for research that examines how social, interpersonal, and community contexts factor into HIV risk taking; identifies best practices in mental health interventions for Black men who have sex with men; and measures sexual orientation and behavior in studies involving large numbers of the Black population.

Similarly, in a paper published in the same issue of the Journal of Black Psychology, Lula Beatty, Darrell Wheeler, and Juarlyn Gaiter recommend “using and developing, if necessary, well-articulated theories appropriate to the culture and experiences of the African American population to guide research; acknowledging and controlling for diversity of the African American population (as part of research), especially in regard to factors that are associated with HIV/AIDS … ; (and) conducting more studies on structural interventions that investigate how sociopolitical and environmental factors shape and can effectively change health behaviors in African American communities …”

It remains to be seen if the attention recently given to Black men on the “DL” represents just another spike in sensational media attention to the issue of HIV/AIDS in Blacks—or a turning-point spawning renewed and expanded community action and scientific research to address issues that have been pressing from the very beginning of the epidemic.

Gilberto R. Gerald is the director of development and communications of the Black Coalition on AIDS, located in San Francisco. He has been involved with community-based HIV/AIDS services targeting the Black community since 1983, and in 1993 served as the co-principal investigator for Meeting the HIV Prevention Needs of Gay and Bisexual Men of Color, a five-city assessment sponsored by the US Conference of Mayors with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.