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Double Lives on the Down Low
NY Times Magazine
New York, NY
08.03.03
By Benoit Denizet-Lewis
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In its upper stories, the Flex bathhouse in Cleveland feels like a squash
club for backslapping businessmen. There's a large gym with free weights and
exercise machines on the third floor. In the common area, on the main floor,
men in towels lounge on couches and watch CNN on big-screen TV's.
In the basement, the mood is different: the TV's are tuned to porn, and the
dimly lighted hallways buzz with sexual energy. A naked black man reclines
on a sling in a room called ''the dungeon play area.'' Along a hallway lined
with
lockers, black men eye each other as they walk by in towels. In small rooms
nearby, some men are having sex. Others are napping.
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.
Twenty years ago, Wallace
came here for fun. He was 22 then, and AIDS seemed to kill only gay
white men in San Francisco and New York. Wallace and the other
black men who frequented Flex in the early 80's worried just about
being spotted walking in the front door.
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.
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.
With no wives or girlfriends around, Flex is a safe place for men on the DL
to let down their guards. There aren't many white men here either (I'm
one
of them), and that's often the norm for DL parties and clubs.
Some private DL events won't even let whites in the door. Others will let
you in if you look
''black enough,'' which is code for looking masculine, tough and
''straight.'' That's not to say that DL guys are attracted only to men of color.
''Some of the black boys here love white boys,'' Wallace says.
While Wallace tests one man for H.I.V. (not all DL men ignore the health threat),
I walk back downstairs to change into a towel -- I've been warned twice
by Flex employees that clothes aren't allowed in the club. By the lockers, I
notice
a tall black man in his late teens or early 20's staring at me from a dozen
lockers down. Abruptly, he walks over and puts his right hand on my left
shoulder.
''You wanna hook up?'' he asks, smiling broadly.
His frankness takes me by
surprise. Bathhouse courtship rituals usually involve a period of aggressive
flirtation -- often heavy and deliberate
staring. ''Are you gay?'' I ask him.
''Nah, man,'' he says.
''I got a girl. You look like you would have a girl, too.''
I tell him that I don't have a girl. ''Doesn't matter,'' he says, stepping
closer. I decline his advances, to which he seems
genuinely perplexed. Before I go back upstairs, I ask him if he
normally uses condoms
here.
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