1 Obituary: Photographer Herb Ritts–‘A psychologist, a playmate, a persuader’ 1/03
2 Pointing Gay Immigrants To Grounds for Asylum1/02
3 Call for help from gay US troops surge 3/07
4 Obituary: C.A. Tripp, who wrote influential book on homosexuality, dies at 83 5/22
5 A Nomadic Visionary: Marsden Hartley 6/08
6 Supreme Court Strikes Down Gay Sex Ban 6/26
7 Double Lives on the Down Low–Secret Lives of Gay Black Men 8/03
Chicago Tribune, Chicago, IL( http://www.chicagotribune.com )
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0301030014jan03,1,5295444.story
January 3, 2003
1
Obituary: Photographer Herb Ritts–‘A psychologist, a playmate, a persuader’
by Mary Panzer, Special to the Tribune
Everyone wants to be loved for the right reasons. Herb Ritts, the photographer who died at age 50 on Dec. 27, had an undeniable talent for finding your best side and putting it on film.
He also knew how to hide your unattractive parts, wherever they might show up. And as we all know, often our best qualities are also the ones that get us into the most trouble. But after Herb Ritts was finished, your beauty remained and the trouble was gone. Growing up affluent and gay in Los Angeles, Ritts learned how to live with a secret. He came out to his family in the late ’70s, when homosexuality was not a new idea, though it still remained a choice one could not easily admit to the outside world. But as his early portrait of Richard Gere shows, Ritts discovered a way to celebrate the male body without scaring anybody. Ritts learned a lot from other photographers. From the 1930s, he stole the sleek, muscled males that Leni Riefenstahl famously photographed at the Berlin Olympics of 1936. And he took the still, perfect, sculpted figures from fashion photographers for Vogue, like Horst and George Platt Lynes. Lynes also photographed male nudes for the sexologist Dr. Kinsey but those images carry a distinctly dark, illicit tone.
By contrast, Ritts brought a lively sense of pleasure to his project. He copied the stark compositions of Richard Avedon, but where Avedon’s work startled audiences in the 1970s, Ritts’ photographs in the 1990s just look stylish. As a result, when he photographed gorgeous young models such as Marky Mark and Antonio Sabato Jr. in tight-fitting designer underwear, his flattering light made their lovely strong bodies look innocent and happy, not dangerous. The ads showed up in mainstream magazines and at bus stops, and no one blinked. Ritts loved glamor wherever he found it, and he photographed every female celebrity of his time, from young Madonna and aging Meryl Streep, to pregnant Annette Benning, and Britney Spears. Madonna clearly aroused something special. Another star might have been grateful for his ability to make an icon out of her long, bare neck, turned up profile and shaggy blond curls. But the singer only seemed to take it as a challenge, and dared him to repeat the performance when she next emerged, with new hair and a different shape. Where Ritts usually seems to collaborate with his subjects, in the case of the Madonna, one senses a fierce, intimate competition.
In an unusually candid reflection on his career, Ritts once claimed that the fame of his pictures would last longer that the celebrity of many of his subjects. In the future, he observed, people would want to know Madonna because she had been photographed by Herb Ritts. Ritts was too talented, and too ambitious, to limit his subject matter or his medium.
He published seven books, including several devoted to celebrity portraiture, one on Africa, an another on gay couples. He produced many music videos, winning awards for his work with Chris Isaak, Janet Jackson and Madonna. One recent production, "Telling Stories," by Tracy Chapman, appears on her Web site. Chapman also includes an affectionate farewell to the photographer, who created her first album cover, and the joyous androgynous image that has become her trademark. In the summer of 1988, when Vanity Fair sought an interview with Monica Lewinsky, she declined to meet with reporters, but agreed to be photographed – by Herb Ritts. He photographed her on the beach, in gingham and denim, making an oblique and flattering reference to the young Marilyn Monroe. She was innocent and sexy all at once, a young beauty not quite aware of her power.
It’s no wonder Monica felt safe and happy before his camera. Ingrid Sischy, former editor of Interview, has called him "a diplomat, a psychologist, a playmate and a great persuader," and declared his pictures to be "the equivalent of miracles." Someday, when your grandchildren stumble on an old copy of Vogue or Vanity Fair, when they laugh at the fashions of Versace or Karan, Herb Ritts will be there. The muscled young men, the sleek young women, the bodies that look so clean and pretty. What made them so exciting? What made Ritts such a star?
The obituaries quote his many celebrity friends, dealers and magazine editors who all agree on his charm, his sweetness and his talent, but no one mentions how well Herb Ritts met the special needs of his historical moment. His beautifully composed photographs, with their open pleasure in the male form, also coincided with the emergence of AIDS. When historians try to account for the exhilaration and power of the late 20th Century movement for Gay Rights, they will surely recognize Ritts as an important ambassador. With his images floating in the mainstream, how much easier it was to accept such beauty as normal and natural. Under the guise of advertising and celebrity portraiture Ritts won public acceptance for private delight in men’s bodies. Our silence regarding this contribution may actually be the most eloquent tribute – what once seemed so difficult to see and talk about has become so ordinary that we don’t mention it at all.
Mary Panzer is former curator of photography at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the author of "Mathew Brady and the Image of History."
Newsday, Melville, NY, ( http://www.newsday.com/ )
http://www.newsday.com/news/printedition/ny-b3070563jan02,0,822014.story
January 2, 2003
2
Pointing Gay Immigrants To Grounds for Asylum-Sexual orientation can be one way to navigate the law
by Alan Krawitz
Navigating the labyrinth of U.S. immigration laws has always been a daunting task for scores of lesbian and gay immigrants. According to the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Task Force, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization founded in 1994 for gays and people with HIV, many people are unaware of the rules and regulations governing the issuance of visas and the granting of asylum status in this country.
Pradeep Singla, legal director for the task force, and Vishal Trivedi, an immigration coordinator for Gay Men’s Health Crisis – the nation’s oldest AIDS service organization – discussed those topics at a recent forum held at the Queens Pride House gay community center in Woodside to address immigration rights and legal issues for gays and people with HIV. While Singla said there are many injustices that face gay and HIV-positive immigrants, he stressed that ignorance of current immigration laws on the part of both immigrants and their attorneys can be even more damaging.
"Many in the gay community – including some attorneys – are not aware that sexual orientation or HIV positive status are grounds to apply for asylum," Singla said. For example, Singla said many gays and lesbians don’t realize that their sexual orientation can be the basis of an asylum claim by proving a well-founded fear of persecution. "Generally, serious physical threats such as beatings, harassment, arrests at the hands of the state or groups the state either can’t or won’t control [that is, organized vigilante groups] can sufficiently prove a sexual orientation-based asylum claim," he said.
He stressed that the chances of being granted asylum "increases sixfold" with proper legal representation. Both the Task Force and GMHC offer pro-bono legal assistance for people seeking asylum. Ordinarily, asylum-related legal fees could run into the "thousands." Singla added that a recent change in immigration law now mandates that an applicant for asylum must file within one year of their last entry into the United States.
However, Singla also said that certain risks are inherent with an application for asylum. Those risks include the possibility that the INS can use information supplied with the application to initiate deportation proceedings. Since 1993, U.S. immigration policy for people with HIV has stated that all HIV positive applicants are "inadmissible" because the INS has classified HIV as a communicable disease of public health significance.
However, Trivedi said certain waivers are available for those seeking nonimmigrant visas and permanent residence. He said those seeking permanent residence must generally have a parent, a spouse or a child who is a green-card holder already in the United States. In addition, they must show that they will not become a burden to the U.S. health-care system. Two types of nonimmigrant visas are available to people with HIV, Trivedi said. One is known as a 30-day entry and is granted for entrance into the United States for 30 days or less to attend a conference, receive medical treatment, visit family members or conduct other legitimate business. However, Trivedi noted that this type of waiver is difficult to obtain.
The other type of visa is an event waiver and is granted to foreign nationals to attend educational conferences, sporting events and other events deemed in the public interest. Both Trivedi and Singla agreed that family-based immigration through a spouse or immediate family member is the easiest route to getting a green card. They estimated that 75 percent of all immigration to the United States is family-based. . Alan Krawitz is a freelance writer.
Gay.com U.K.
http://uk.gay.com/headlines/3910
March 7, 2003
3
Call for help from gay US troops surge
by Ari Bendersky, Gay.com/PlanetOut.com Network
An organisation that provides legal assistance to gay and lesbian members of the US armed forces has reported a significant increase in the number of calls from gay military personnel seeking assistance. In the period between Jan. 1 and March 1, the Servicemembers Legal Defence Network (SLDN) received 170 calls for help, up 30% from 119 during the same time in 2002.
And SLDN expects those numbers to increase throughout the year as the United States gears up for a possible war with Iraq. "We project receiving a record 1,100 calls for assistance during the 2003 calendar year," said SLDN Executive Director C. Dixon Osburn. "As long as our military continues to discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans, SLDN will remain on the frontlines, providing zealous legal assistance to our clients." SLDN was founded in 1995, two years after the start of "don’t ask, don’t tell." Since that time, the Washington-based legal group has seen its calls for help increase each year. In 2002, it received 913 calls versus 649 calls the year before. "I think the war is playing a role in that increase," said Steve Ralls, director of communications for SLDN. "I think there’s a greater awareness of SLDN, especially since the firing of the Arabic linguists and the (1999) murder (of PFC Barry Winchell) at Fort Campbell."
With the threat of war looming in the Middle East and with North Korea, more gay military may call for assistance for fear of being harassed far from home without the protection they can receive in America, Ralls said. "There are service members making statements now, but we’re telling them not to expect to be discharged before they’re deployed if their papers have already come up," he said. "A lot of service members are being harassed and don’t want to be deployed and be thousands of miles away from home." In July 2000, the Department of Defense drafted the Anti-Harassment Action Plan, a directive which stated that "mistreatment, harassment and inappropriate comments or gestures, including that based on sexual orientation, are not acceptable – further, the directive should make clear that commanders and leaders will be held accountable for failure to enforce this directive."
The plan was developed after 80 percent of 75,000 active service members polled said they had heard anti-gay remarks during the previous year and of that group, more than one-third confirmed either seeing or being the target of anti-gay harassment. Last year, the SLDN released a report with findings that showed while the Defense Department has implemented the Anti-Harassment Action Plan, the directive is not being practiced.
"The Pentagon’s failure to move aggressively to implement the Anti-Harassment Action Plan is inexcusable," Osburn said at the time. "The Pentagon itself has said anti-gay harassment undermines good order, discipline and morale. By tolerating continued harassment, ridicule and assault of men and women in uniform, the Pentagon is working against what it knows to be in the best interest of our armed forces." As for non-gay people suddenly "coming out" to avoid going to battle, SLDN has a message for them. "We won’t help them," Ralls said.
Associated Press
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-ny–obit-tripp0522may22,0,61064 5.story?coll=ny-ap-regional-wire
May 22, 2003
4
Obituary: C.A. Tripp, who wrote influential book on homosexuality, dies at 83
Nyack, N.Y. – C.A. Tripp, the author of a widely read book which sought to dispel popular misconceptions about homosexuality, died Saturday. He was 83, and died of cancer. Tripp’s book "The Homosexual Matrix," a scholarly work published by McGraw-Hill in 1975, set forth new ideas about sexual attraction and sold nearly 500,000 copies. Author and AIDS activist Larry Kramer said in an interview with The New York Times that the book was the first from a "reputable source" that "dared to speak openly of homosexuality as a healthy occurrence."
Born Clarence Arthur Tripp in Denton, Texas, Tripp studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and served in the Navy before immersing himself in the work of Freud during the 1940s. Beginning in 1948, he worked with Alfred Kinsey at his Institute for Sex Research in Bloomington, Ind., until Kinsey’s death in 1956. Tripp then earned an undergraduate degree from the New School for Social Research and a doctorate in clinical psychology from New York University, eventually establishing a private psychology practice. He and author Lewis Gannett recently finished a biography of Lincoln that speculates that the former president was gay.
Washington Post, Washington, DC
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15854-2003Jun5.html
June 8, 2003
5
A Nomadic Visionary: Marsden Hartley Roamed Far and Wide to Arrive at a Signature, and Stunning, Style
by Blake Gopnik, Washington Post Staff Writer
There’s a lot not to like in the art of Marsden Hartley. There’s his mumbo-jumbo mysticism. His fascination with Teutonic military pomp. His nearly-Nazi love of all things Aryan. His contrived, calculated Americanness, arrived at only late in life. His condescending affection for the "simple, sturdy people" of the rural working class. And his corny gay cheesecake: pictures of hairy boxers and hunky lumberjacks, and of cavalry officers in skintight leather breeches.
Yet the simple visual intelligence of Hartley’s best pictures manages to outweigh almost all the dumbness of his subjects and his attitudes, and to confirm his status as a great of early American modernism. A major new Hartley retrospective, the first in almost a quarter-century, opened yesterday at the Phillips Collection. Many of the complex paintings in it have a stunning visual effect. Hartley got a modest start in life. He was born in 1877, in remote Lewiston, Maine, to British immigrants working in the local mills. After the death of his mother and a fractured childhood living with relatives, he eventually followed his father to Cleveland, where his stepmother encouraged him to study at the local art school.
None of this seems like auspicious background for a budding art-world radical. But already, in even the earliest pictures on display at the Phillips, there are impressive signs of talent and vision. A tiny, moody painting of Walt Whitman’s house in Camden, N.J., dates from about 1905, after Hartley had moved to New York on an art scholarship. It is an extraordinarily tight little picture, with credible avant-garde credentials. Its space is kept shallow, so that five leaded windows and a skinny door are turned into a flat, modernist grid. Its muddy-gray paint is applied in thick, bold, expressive swaths – a positively Whitmanesque combination of gloom and bravura. The reddish board the picture’s painted on is left showing in tiny spots across the surface, as though a sputtering firelight inside the house is shining through the paint as well.
Hartley’s early landscapes, showing his native state, are stitched together from a mess of brightly colored flicks of paint that demonstrate the same tightly controlled radicalism. They were impressive enough to earn the young artist a place in the stable of Alfred Stieglitz, the New York dea ler and photographer who led the charge for daring modern art in the United States. (In 2000, the National Gallery mounted a major exhibition about Stieglitz’s career as an art dealer; the Hartleys in it held up very well, even in competition with wonderful works by Rodin, Brancusi, Picasso and the like.)
But it’s not just that Hartley managed a point-by-point accumulation of impressive modern gestures and devices, as some of his peers did. Somehow – and it’s almost impossible to dope out exactly how – Hartley’s innate sense of pictorial order led him to make pictures that hang together as tight-knit, eminently coherent wholes. In 1912 Hartley made his first trip to Europe, where he was to spend big chunks of the next two decades.
(Throughout his life, Hartley never settled down in one place for more than a few years. He seemed to have a hard time ever finding somewhere he could feel at home. A century ago in the United States, being gay and working-class can’t have been a recipe for social ease and standing.)
In Paris he started frequenting the famous salon of Gertrude and Leo Stein almost at once. Soon he began to make paintings that held together as well as anything by his new, and much more famous, French neighbors. A still life with bananas, a lemon and two hot peppers has a gorgeous blend of tarry blacks and unnaturally vibrant colors. You can see Cezanne in it, a bit of Matisse, some of the tough, stained-glass expressionism of Georges Rouault and a touch of Picasso’s fractured form and space, as well as some of the Spaniard’s willingness to flirt with ugliness.
But in Hartley it’s all tied together by an immaculate intuition about what makes a winning picture. Hartley’s real breakthrough, however, came a year or so later, when he left Paris for Munich and then Berlin. In the German capital, he worked his way toward a brilliant series of pictures that are as fully original and individual as anything else from that fertile period in modern art. The Berlin pictures are by far Hartley’s greatest works. But they are also some of his most troubling ones. For all their great looks, they also point to almost everything that’s wrong with Hartley at his worst. The subjects of the Berlin pictures go in two different directions, both less than palatable. In one batch, called the Amerika Series, Hartley plays with generic, hackneyed American Indian motifs. He wants to build an artificially romantic image of the Noble Savage; the result is as pernicious, wrongheaded and condescending as anything in Rudyard Kipling. In Hartley’s Indian fantasies, prairie chiefs in feather headdresses paddle woodland canoes across a painted surface based on the patternings and colors of textiles from the Southwest. He gives us a smorgasbord of trite Indianness, as seen through unthinking paleface eyes. In another group of pictures, Hartley does the same romanticizing job on Prussia’s military elite.
A 1913 picture called "The Warriors," painted in triumphant golds and whites and reds, shows the flower of the Kaiser’s cavalry arrayed like the phalanx of angels seen in a medieval altarpiece. Hartley, who was also a significant poet, waxed lyrical about the inspiration for this picture: "Those huge cuirassiers of the Kaiser’s special guard – all in white – white leather breeches skin-tight. . . . There was six foot of youth under all this garniture." It seems as though the closeted artist got such an erotic charge from these strapping German boys that his enthusiasm carried over to the authoritarian regime and values that they represented. Luckily, it also carried over into how he painted them. The best of Hartley’s Berlin pictures have an explosion of color and zigzagging line that hits the viewer’s senses like an artillery barrage. Or like the climax in the fireworks from a victory parade.
Or, as in Georgia O’Keeffe’s famous formulation, like a military band going at it in a closet. As usual with Hartley, it’s not easy to specify precisely what makes these pictures work so very well – so well that we can just about afford to ignore their obnoxious subject matter. Their success has partly to do with Hartley’s almost unerring sense of surface design. The shallow space of the period’s other avant-garde artists gets crushed perfectly flat in Hartley, so that his paintings look almost like assembled scraps of cutout imagery – like mementos pressed down under glass. The very greatest pictures from Berlin are quasi-abstract "portraits" of a German cavalry officer who was Hartley’s beloved friend – maybe an actual lover – and who died in the early days of World War I. These "War Motif" paintings are made up of various commemorative artifacts – the hero’s Iron Cross, his plumed cavalry helmet, his spurs and epaulets – arrayed across the surface of the picture. But they aren’t so much accumulations of significant motifs arbitrarily brought together within a single frame, as almost-plausible assemblages of the real accouterments of war.
There’s an ancient military tradition of accumulating the arms of dead heroes – or of vanquished enemies – into armorial displays; think of the cliched image of the polished breastplate, with two spears crossed behind it and an empty helmet and other gear plonked down on top. Now imagine laying such a trophy pile out onto hot asphalt, then steamrolling over it, and you’ll get a sense of how Hartley’s paintings work. The best ones feature tar-black backgrounds that make the colors superimposed on them seem that much more intense. By the end of 1915, tensions between the United States and Germany had increased to dangerous levels, and Hartley decided to sail home. Once in New York, his Teutonic sympathies didn’t earn him or his new pictures any friends, so he abandoned his Germanophilic works and views to become an echt American once more. Hartley goes determinedly, calculatedly, self-consciously native. There was a brief period in 1916, when Hartley was based in with-it Provincetown, Mass., where he was still making urban, European-style pictures – either pure abstractions that prove just how gifted he was at crafting formal compositions, or cafe-table still lifes that evoke the School of Paris without sinking into empty derivation from Picasso and his ilk. For most of the rest of his career, however, he wasn’t happy just to be an innovative, talented painter.
He was looking to express some kind of an authentic American soul – something tied down to the rocks and soil of his homeland – and that questionable hunt often canceled out his innate skills at building pictures. There are various O’Keeffe-y pictures of New Mexico that seem an awkward attempt to merge modernist, stylized forms and romantic ideas about the empty, sacred West. There are pictures made in Mexico that do for that country’s worst stereotypes what Hartley’s Indian fantasies did for native culture. Embarrassing talk about the mystic, hotblooded soul of Mexico is, unfortunately, reflected in the cliche-ridden paintings Hartley made there. Even his most famous body of late paintings, inspired by long stays among the fisherfolk of Nova Scotia in the mid-’30s, seems hackneyed to me. This most sophisticated of painters adopted a faux simplicity to render portraits of the Mason family he boarded with during his two Nova Scotia summers.
To me, these pictures reek of a sophisticate’s condescension toward the charming crudeness of the laboring classes. Apparently, these fishermen didn’t deserve the complex, cryptic picture-making Hartley gave the Provincetown elite. Their portraits have to be as dumb – sorry, make that "healthy" and "forthright" – as Hartley’s writings make the sitters out to be. (Two of the Mason boys were lost at sea during Hartley’s stay with them. Their posthumous portraits bring out the worst of Hartley’s maudlin mysticism, a constant feature in his work that only sometimes rises to the surface.) Only a few of the late paintings seem to leave such a self-conscious, mannered shtick behind in favor of a more straightforward struggle just to make paintings that work.
There’s a lobster on a black background, and a couple of still lifes in front of open windows, that are complex, interesting things to look at. And there’s a final gorgeous seascape done in Maine in 1940, three years before the artist’s death from heart failure. Hartley had returned to spend his final years in his native state, where he was at long last received as a local hero. He found worthwhile inspiration there. "The Wave" is a brilliantly straightforward treatment of water hitting coastal rocks. In this painting, Hartley doesn’t have a special point to make about his subject matter or anything it might stand for. The scene isn’t about Americanness; it just happens to be American. Hartley’s not even trying to assert his place on the cutting edge of modern art.
He just uses stone and sea as an excuse for building up a fascinating picture, where feathered blocks of white and pale-blue paint collide with hulking bands of black and gray. Hartley’s managed a perfect equivalence between his subject and its treatment, in an idiom that’s identifiably his own. Just as he’d done 40 years before, in the Maine landscapes that had launched him as an American artist to be reckoned with.
June 26, 2003
6
Supreme Court Strikes Down Gay Sex Ban
The US Supreme Court struck down a ban on gay sex Thursday, ruling that the law was an unconstitutional violation of privacy. The 6-3 ruling reverses course from a ruling 17 years ago that states could punish homosexuals for what such laws historically called deviant sex. The case is a major reexamination of the rights and acceptance of gay people in the United States.
More broadly, it also tests a state’s ability to classify as a crime what goes on behind the closed bedroom doors of consenting adults. Thursday’s ruling invalidated a Texas law against "deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex." Defending that law, Texas officials said that it promoted the institutions of marriage and family, and argued that communities have the right to choose their own standards. The law "demeans the lives of homosexual persons,"
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority. Laws forbidding homosexual sex, once universal, now are rare. Those on the books are rarely enforced but underpin other kinds of discrimination, lawyers for two Texas men had argued to the court. The men "are entitled to respect for their private lives," Kennedy wrote. "The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime," he said. Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer agreed with Kennedy in full. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor agreed with the outcome of the case but not all of Kennedy’s rationale. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented.
"The court has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda," Scalia wrote for the three. He took the unusual step of reading his dissent from the bench. "The court has taken sides in the culture war," Scalia said, adding that he has "nothing against homosexuals." The two men at the heart of the case, John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner, have retreated from public view. They were each fined $200 and spent a night in jail for the misdemeanor sex charge in 1998. The case began when a neighbor with a grudge faked a distress call to police, telling them that a man was "going crazy" in Lawrence’s apartment. Police went to the apartment, pushed open the door and found the two men having anal sex.
As recently as 1960, every state had an anti-sodomy law. In 37 states, the statutes have been repealed by lawmakers or blocked by state courts. Of the 13 states with sodomy laws, four – Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri – prohibit oral and anal sex between same-sex couples. The other nine ban consensual sodomy for everyone: Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia. Thursday’s ruling apparently invalidates those laws as well. The Supreme Court was widely criticized 17 years ago when it upheld an antisodomy law similar to Texas’. The ruling became a rallying point for gay activists. Of the nine justices who ruled on the 1986 case, only three remain on the court. Rehnquist was in the majority in that case – Bowers v. Hardwick – as was O’Connor. Stevens dissented.
A long list of legal and medical groups joined gay rights and human rights supporters in backing the Texas men. Many friend-of-the-court briefs argued that times have changed since 1986, and that the court should catch up. At the time of the court’s earlier ruling, 24 states criminalized such behavior. States that have since repealed the laws include Georgia, where the 1986 case arose. Texas defended its sodomy law as in keeping with the state’s interest in protecting marriage and child-rearing. Homosexual sodomy, the state argued in legal papers, "has nothing to do with marriage or conception or parenthood and it is not on a par with these sacred choices." The state had urged the court to draw a constitutional line "at the threshold of the marital bedroom." Although Texas itself did not make the argument, some of the state’s supporters told the justices in friend-of-the-court filings that invalidating sodomy laws could take the court down the path of allowing same-sex marriage. The case is Lawrence v. Texas, 02-102.
New York Times Magazine, New York, N.Y. ( http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/index.html ) http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/magazine/03DOWNLOW.html
August 3, 2003
7
Double Lives on the Down Low
by Benoit Denizet-Lewis
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 HIV.
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 HIV-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 HIV infections. While intravenous drug use is a large part of the problem, experts say that the leading cause of HIV 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 HIV-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 HIV 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 HIV (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. As a recurring announcement comes over the club’s loudspeaker – "HIV testing is available in Room 207. . . . HIV testing in Room 207" – he shakes his head. "Nah, man," he says. "I like it raw."
If Cleveland is the kind of city many gay people flee, Atlanta is a city they escape to. For young black men, Atlanta is the hub of the South, a city with unlimited possibilities, including a place in its vibrant DL scene. I went to Atlanta to meet William, an attractive 35-year-old black man on the DL who asked to be identified by his middle name. I met him in the America Online chat room DLThugs, where he spends some time most days searching for what he calls "real" DL guys – as opposed to the "flaming queens who like to pretend they’re thugs and on the DL."
William says he likes his guys "to look like real guys," and his Internet profile makes it clear what he isn’t looking for: NO STUPID QUESTIONS, FATS, WHITES, STALKERS OR QUEENS. I told him I was a writer, and he eventually agreed to take me around to a few clubs in Atlanta. With one condition: "You better dress cool," he warned me. "Don’t dress, you know, white." William smiles as I climb into his silver Jeep Grand Cherokee, which I take as a good sign.
Two of William’s best friends are in the car with him: Christopher, a thin, boyish 32-year-old with a shaved head, and Rakeem, an outgoing 31-year-old with dreadlocks who asked to be identified by his Muslim name. We drive toward the Palace, a downtown club popular with young guys on the DL. William doesn’t date women anymore and likes guys younger than he is, although they’ve been known to get more attached than he would prefer. "Yeah, he’s always getting stalked," Rakeem says enthusiastically. "The boys just won’t leave him alone. He’s got this weird power to make boys act really stupid." It’s easy to see why. William radiates confidence and control, which serve him well in his daytime role as an executive at a local corporation. He says his co-workers don’t know he likes men ("It’s none of their business," he tells me several times), or that after work he changes personas completely, becoming a major player in the city’s DL scene, organizing parties and events.
Christopher, who sits in the back seat with me, is the only one of the three who is openly gay and not on the DL (although he won’t tell me his last name, for fear of embarrassing his parents). Christopher moved to Atlanta when he was 24 and was surprised when black men in the city couldn’t get enough of him. "They would hit on me at the grocery store, on the street, on the train, always in this sly, DL kind of way where you never actually talk about what you’re really doing," he says. "That’s actually how I met my current boyfriend. He followed me off the train."
Rakeem, a roommate of William’s, moved to Atlanta five years ago from Brooklyn. He says he’s "an urban black gay man on the DL," which he says reflects his comfort with his sexuality but his unwillingness to "broadcast it." People at work don’t know he’s gay. His family wouldn’t know, either, if a vindictive friend hadn’t told them. "I’m a guy’s guy, a totally masculine black gay man, and that’s just beyond my family’s comprehension," he says.
While Rakeem and William proudly proclaim themselves on the Down Low, they wouldn’t have been considered on the DL when men first started claiming the label in the mid-90’s. Back then the culture was completely under the radar, and DL men lived ostensibly heterosexual lives (complete with wives and girlfriends) but also engaged in secret sexual relationships with men. Today, though, an increasing number of black men who have sex only with men identify themselves as DL, further muddying an already complicated group identity. And as DL culture expands, it has become an open secret. For many men on the Down Low, including William and Rakeem, the DL label is both an announcement of masculinity and a separation from white gay culture.
To them, it is the safest identity available – they don’t risk losing their ties to family, friends and black culture. William parks the car in a secluded lot about a block from the Palace. As he breaks out some pot, I ask them if they heard about what happened recently at Morehouse College, where one black student beat another with a bat supposedly for looking at him the wrong way in a dormitory shower. "I’m surprised that kind of stuff doesn’t happen more often," William says. "The only reason it doesn’t is because most black guys are sly enough about it that they aren’t gonna get themselves beaten up. If you’re masculine and a guy thinks you’re checking him out, you can always say: ‘Whoa, chill, I ain’t checking you out. Look at me. Do I look gay to you?’"
Masculinity is a surprisingly effective defense, because until recently the only popular representations of black gay men were what William calls "drag queens or sissies." Rakeem takes a hit from the bowl. "We know there are black gay rappers, black gay athletes, but they’re all on the DL," Rakeem says. "If you’re white, you can come out as an openly gay skier or actor or whatever. It might hurt you some, but it’s not like if you’re black and gay, because then it’s like you’ve let down the whole black community, black women, black history, black pride. You don’t hear black people say, ‘Oh yeah, he’s gay, but he’s still a real man, and he still takes care of all his responsibilities.’ What you hear is, ‘Look at that sissy faggot.’"
I ask them what the difference is between being on the DL and being in the closet. "Being on the DL is about having fun," William tells me. "Being who you are, but keeping your business to yourself. The closet isn’t fun. In the closet, you’re lonely."
"I don’t know," Christopher says. "In some ways I think DL is just a new, sexier way to say you’re in the closet." Both have a point. As William says, DL culture does place a premium on pleasure. It is, DL guys insist, one big party. And there is a certain freedom in not playing by modern society’s rules of self-identification, in not having to explain yourself, or your sexuality, to anyone.
Like the black athletes and rappers they idolize, DL men convey a strong sense of masculine independence and power: I do what I want when I want with whom I want. Even the term Down Low – which was popularized in the 1990’s by the singers TLC and R. Kelly, meaning "secret" – has a sexy ring to it, a hint that you’re doing something wrong that feels right. But for all their supposed freedom, many men on the DL are as trapped – or more trapped – than their white counterparts in the closet. While DL guys regard the closet as something alien (a sad, stifling place where fearful people hide), the closet can be temporary (many closeted men plan to someday "come out").
But black men on the DL typically say they’re on the DL for life. Since they generally don’t see themselves as gay, there is nothing to "come out" to, there is no next step.
Sufficiently stoned, the guys decide to make an appearance at the Palace. More than anything, the place feels like a rundown loft where somebody stuck a bar and a dance floor and called it a club. Still, it’s one of the most popular hangouts for young black men on the DL in Atlanta. William surveys the crowd, which is made up mostly of DL "homo thugs," black guys dressed like gangsters and rappers (baggy jeans, do-rags, and FUBU jackets).
"So many people in here try so hard to look like they’re badasses," he says. "Everyone wants to look like they’re on the DL." As I look out onto the dance floor, I can’t help doing the math. If the C.D.C. is right that nearly 1 in 3 young black men who have sex with men is HIV-positive, then about 50 of the young men on this dance floor are infected, and most of them don’t know it. "You have no idea how many of the boys here tonight would let me" – have sex with them – "without a condom," William tells me. "These young guys swear they know it all. They all want a black thug. They just want the black thug to do his thing."
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.
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 HIV. 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 HIV-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 HIV?
The easy answer to most of these questions is that the black community is simply too homophobic: from womanizing rappers to moralizing preachers, much of the black community views homosexuality as a curse against a race with too many strikes against it. 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.)
But to many men on the DL, sociological and financial considerations are beside the point: they say they wouldn’t come out even if they felt they could. They see black men who do come out either as having chosen their sexuality over their skin color or as being so effeminate that they wouldn’t have fooled anyone anyway. In a black world that puts a premium on hypermasculinity, men who have sex with other men are particularly sensitive to not appearing soft in any way. Maybe that’s why many guys on the DL don’t go to gay bars. "Most of the guys I’ve messed around with, I’ve actually met at straight clubs," says D., a 21-year-old college student on the DL whom I met on the Internet, and then in person in New York City. "Guys will come up to me and ask me some stupid thing like, ‘Yo, you got a piece of gum?’ I’ll say, ‘Nah, but what’s up?’ Some guys will look at me and say, ‘What do you mean, what’s up?’ but the ones on the DL will keep talking to me." Later he adds: "It’s easier for me to date guys on the DL. Gay guys get too clingy, and they can blow your cover. Real DL guys, they have something to lose, too. It’s just safer to be with someone who has something to lose." D. says he prefers sex with women, but he sometimes has sex with men because he "gets bored."
But even the DL guys I spoke with who say they prefer sex with men are adamant that the nomenclature of white gay culture has no relevance for them. "I’m masculine," as one 18-year-old college student from Providence, R.I., who is on the DL told me over the phone. "There’s no way I’m gay." I asked him what his definition of gay is. "Gays are the faggots who dress, talk and act like girls. That’s not me." That kind of logic infuriates many mainstream gay people. To them, life on the DL is an elaborately rationalized repudiation of everything the gay rights movement fought for – the right to live without shame and without fear of reprisal. It’s a step back into the dark days before liberation, before gay-bashing was considered a crime, before gay television characters were considered family entertainment and way, way before the current Supreme Court ruled that gay people are "entitled to respect for their private lives."
Emil Wilbekin, the black and openly gay editor in chief of Vibe magazine, has little patience for men on the DL. "To me, it’s a dangerous cop-out," he says. "I get that it’s sexy. I get that it’s hot to see some big burly hip-hop kid who looks straight but sleeps with guys, but the bottom line is that it’s dishonest. I think you have to love who you are, you have to have respect for yourself and others, and to me most men on the DL have none of those qualities. There’s nothing ‘sexy’ about getting HIV, or giving it to your male and female lovers. That’s not what being a real black man is about."
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?" So increasing numbers of black men – and, lately, other men of color who claim the DL identity – split the difference. They’ve created a community of their own, a cultural "party" where whites aren’t invited. "Labeling yourself as DL is a way to disassociate from everything white and upper class," says George Ayala, the director of education for AIDS Project Los Angeles.
And that, he says, is a way for DL men to assert some power. Still, for all the defiance that DL culture claims for itself, for all the forcefulness of the "never apologize, never explain" stance, a sense of shame can hover at the margins. It’s the inevitable price of living a double life. Consider these last lines of a DL college student’s online profile. "Lookin 4 cool ass brothers on tha down low. . . . You aint dl if you have a V.I.P. pass to tha gay spot. . . . You aint dl if you call ur dude ‘gurl.’ . . . Put some bass in ur voice yo and whats tha deal wit tha attitude?
If I wanted a broad I would get one – we both know what we doin is wrong." The world headquarters of the Web site www.streetthugz.com is a small, nondescript storefront next to a leather bar on Cleveland’s West Side. The site’s founder, Rick Dickson, invites me to watch one of its live Web casts, which he says feature "the most masculine DL brothers in the world doing what they do best." Rick opens the door holding a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. Inside, a group of young black men sit in a thick haze of cigarette smoke as the song "Bitch Better Have My Money" plays from a nearby stereo.
By the far wall, two men type frantically on computer keyboards, participating in 30 chat-room conversations at once. Near the street-front window, which is covered by a red sheet, there are three muscular black men in their early 20’s. Rick sits down and lights another cigarette. A part-time comic who goes by the stage name Slick Rick, he has a shaved head, piercing green eyes and a light-skinned face with a default setting on mean.
Twice a week, Rick’s thugs, as he calls them, perform a sex show for anyone who cares to log on. Although less than a year old, the site has developed a devoted following, thanks mostly to chat-room word of mouth. "We’re going to be the next Bill Gates of the Internet industry," he assures me. "We got black DL thugs getting it on, and that’s what people want to see!" One of the site’s most popular stars is a tall, strikingly handsome 23-year-old former Division 1 basketball player, who goes by the name Jigga. When I first meet Jigga about 10 minutes before the show, he’s naked, stretching and doing push-ups in an adjacent room as he peppers me with questions about journalism and sportswriting. "I want to be a sportswriter," he says. "Either that, or a lawyer. I love to argue." Unlike some of the other streetthugz stars who dropped out of school and hustle for money, Jigga says he comes from a close middle-class family and always did well academically.
Considering all that, I ask him how he came to find himself here. "It’s some extra cash," he says. "But mostly, it’s ’cause I like the attention. What can I say? I’m vain." Jigga says he has sex with both men and women, but he doesn’t label himself as bisexual. "I’m just freaky," he says with a smile. Like many guys on the DL, Jigga first connected to other DL men through phone personals lines, which still have certain advantages over Internet chat rooms. "You can tell a lot right away by a voice," he says later. "There are guys who naturally sound masculine, and then there’s guys who are obviously trying to hide the fact that they’re big girls."
At 10:07 p.m., seven minutes behind schedule, Rick announces, "It’s show time at the Apollo." He unfolds a burgundy carpet that serves as the stage, and Jigga and two thugs take their places. The phone won’t stop ringing as viewers call to make requests ("Can I talk to Jigga when he’s done?"), and Rick answers each call with an enthusiastic reference to the caller’s location. "Hey, we got Detroit in the house! Say wuzzup to Detroit!"
The show temporarily goes "off air" when Chi, a 32-year-old promoter for the site, trips over the MegaCam’s power cord. While someone else plugs it back in, he takes a seat on the sidelines. Thin and deceptively strong, Chi looks younger than his age. He has a tattoo on his left arm, which he tells me is a reminder of his gang days. Back then, he says, before he moved to Cleveland, his life was a disaster: he had three kids with three women and spent most of his 20’s in jail for drug trafficking. Chi says he doesn’t deal drugs anymore – not since his mother, a heroin addict, died with a needle in her arm.
Today he works at a fast-food joint in a shopping-mall food court and is a talent scout for Rick, which means that if he spots a young black man with "the look" (tough, masculine and preferably with a wild streak), he’ll ask him if he’d like to take some pictures for money – or, better yet, act in one of the site’s live sex shows. Chi has a fiancÈe he has been with for four years. When Rick has seen enough foreplay, he throws condoms at the boys. Rick has been making a big deal to me about how his site promotes safe sex, which he insists is a moral obligation at a time when so many young black men in America are dying of AIDS.
But previous viewers of the show told me they didn’t see condoms being used, and the site boasts of keeping everything "raw." I ask Rick about the discrepancy. "It’s just an expression, man," he says, and explains that the sex is sometimes simulated. The actors seem somewhat bored, but the point, I gather, is not what they do on camera, but how they look. And these guys look straight – in fact, they look as if they might rather be having sex with women.
That, Rick knows, is the ultimate turn-on in much of the DL world, where the sexual icon is the tough unemotional gangster thug. "Do these guys ever kiss?" I ask Rick. "Well," he explains, "thugs don’t really kiss. Sometimes they stick their tongues in each other’s mouths, but it’s not really kissing. Gay people kiss. DL thugs don’t kiss."
In May 1986, Sandra Singleton McDonald showed up at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, eager to begin her research into diseases affecting blacks in the South. "Well," said a young research assistant there, "then you’ll want to look into AIDS." McDonald laughed. "Baby, you must have misunderstood my question," she said in her loving, motherly voice. "I’m talking about African-American diseases."
"Yes, I know," the man said. "Like I said, you’ll want to look into AIDS." McDonald did, and what she learned floored her. "This wasn’t just a gay, white man’s disease like we had all been told from the beginning," recalls McDonald, the founder of Outreach Inc., an Atlanta-based nonprofit organization providing services to those affected by AIDS and substance abuse in the city’s black communities. "I went out and told leaders in the black community that we needed to start dealing with this now, and they looked at me like I was crazy. People were outraged that I was even bringing this up. They said, ‘Oh, be quiet, that’s a white problem.’
But why would we think that a sexually transmitted disease would stay within one racial group, or within one geographic area? It made no sense. The public health community made a lot of mistakes and gave out a lot of wrong information. Once we became aware of the impact of the disease, we did a lot of blaming and shaming so that we could feel O.K. and say, ‘This isn’t about us.’" Five years later, that fiction ceased to be viable when Magic Johnson told a national television audience that he was HIV-positive. AIDS organizations were flooded with calls from panicked black men and women wanting to know more about the disease. Meanwhile, Magic dismissed the rumors that he’d slept with men during his N.B.A. career, insisting he didn’t get infected through homosexual sex, but rather through sex with a woman.
Young black men on inner-city basketball courts weren’t so sure. They wondered if maybe Magic had men on the side. That it took Johnson’s announcement to introduce the reality of AIDS to the black community goes to the depth of the denial around the disease. By 1991, 35,990 African-American men had been reported with AIDS (roughly half having contracted it through sexual intercourse), accounting for about a quarter of all AIDS cases in America. But while there was a mass mobilization around AIDS in the early 80’s among gay white men, there was no similar movement among black men with AIDS, black leaders, politicians, clergy or civil rights organizations.
"There was a real sense in black communities that you had to put your best face forward in order to prove that you deserve equal rights and equal status, and that face didn’t include gays and IV drug users with AIDS," says Cathy Cohen, author of "The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics." "It’s been a very slow process for the black leadership in America to own up to this disease. Not acknowledge it in passing, but own it." Black churches, which are the heart of many African-American communities, were particularly slow to respond to the crisis, and many still haven’t, even despite the disease’s ravages within their parishes.
In 1999, after female congregants of Cleveland’s Antioch Baptist Church told their pastor that they were HIV-positive, the church started an AIDS ministry that has been applauded for its courage and effectiveness. Still, the black church – like many in white America – is careful not to condone homosexual behavior. "Some gays want a flat-out, standing-on-the-tower affirmation from the church that the gay lifestyle, or the lifestyle of whoring around with men, is acceptable," says Kelvin Berry, the director of the Antioch program. "And that’s not going to happen."
Combating AIDS in these communities also means confronting popular conspiracy theories that claim that HIV was created by the U.S. government to kill black people. One study in the 90’s by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference found that 54 percent of blacks thought HIV testing was a trick to infect them with AIDS. In the early 90’s, the rapper Kool Moe Dee and Spike Lee expressed concern that HIV was a part of a calculated campaign intended to rid the world of gay men and minorities, and as recently as 1999, Will Smith told Vanity Fair that "possibly AIDS was created as a result of biological-warfare testing."
Pernessa C. Seele, founder and C.E.O. of the Balm in Gilead, an international AIDS organization that works with black churches, explained, "For the most part, we don’t want to get tested, and we don’t want to get treatment, because we really believe that the system is designed to kill us." She continued: "And our history allows us, or helps us, to believe that. We have documented history where these kinds of diseases have been perpetuated on us. And that’s why it’s so important for the church to get involved. Black people trust the church. We don’t trust health care. We don’t trust doctors and nurses, but we trust the church. So when the church says, ‘Get tested,’ when the church says, ‘Take your medicine,’ people will do it."
Other black AIDS organizations are focused on prevention. In some cases, the strategies are straightforward: push condoms, distribute clean needles. But reaching men on the DL is difficult. James L. King, a publishing executive, spoke about his former DL life at a National Conference on African-Americans and AIDS. "I sleep with men, but I am not bisexual, and I am certainly not gay," King said. "I am not going to your clinics, I am not going to read your brochures, I am not going to get tested. I assure you that none of the brothers on the Down Low are paying the least bit of attention to what you say."
Earl Pike, executive director of the AIDS Task Force of Cleveland, agrees that many of the prevention messages aimed at black men have been unsuccessful. "Up to this point, we’ve failed to make a convincing case to young black men about why they should listen to us when we tell them to put on a condom, mostly because we’ve had the wrong people delivering the wrong kind of message," he says. "The usual prevention message for all these years can be interpreted as saying: ‘Gee, we’re sorry about racism. We’re sorry about homophobia in your homes and churches. We’re sorry that urban schools are crappy. We’re sorry that you can’t find a good job. We’re sorry about lack of literacy. We’re sorry about all these things, but you really need to start using condoms, because if you don’t, you could get infected tomorrow, or next year, or some point during the next decade, and if you do get infected, at some point, you could get sick and die.’"
Many AIDS organizations now say that frank, sexy prevention messages that use the masculine imagery of hip-hop culture are the only way to reach men on the DL. In St. Louis, for example, a $64,000 federal grant financed a billboard campaign – depicting two muscular, shirtless black men embracing – aimed at raising AIDS awareness.
But Mayor Francis Slay called the billboards inappropriate and ordered them taken down. "I need a beer," Chi says as we drive through downtown Cleveland on a Saturday night, looking for something to do. It’s been three months since I last saw him at the streetthugz.com filming. As we stop at a red light, he turns to get a better look at a young Hispanic woman in the car next to us. "That girl is beautiful," he says. "But she needs to lose the car. What a shame – a beautiful woman driving a Neon!" Chi loves women. He also likes men, although, like many guys on the DL, he doesn’t verbalize his attraction to them, even when he’s with like-minded people. When I ask him about this, he’s stumped to explain why. "I don’t know," he says.
"Maybe it’s because being black, you just learn to keep that to yourself." Anyway, he always had a girlfriend. "Guys were there for sex." Unlike many other DL guys, who never tell anyone about their private lives, Chi opens up with little prompting. He says that he loves his fiancÈe but that he doesn’t consider the sex he has with men to be cheating. "Guys are a totally different thing." Unbeknown to his fiancÈe, he has been casually dating his male roommate for several months. "I told her that he’s gay and makes passes at me," he says, "but she doesn’t know we have sex."
On some level, Chi says he feels bad about the deception. Right now, though, he isn’t feeling guilty. His fiancÈe just called to tell him that she’s going out tonight – and that he needs to come over to pick up their feisty 1-year-old son. "She just wants to go out and shake her groove thing with her friends instead of taking care of him like she said she would," Chi says. "Man, she’s selfish sometimes. I love her, but sometimes I hate her, you know what I’m saying?" We pull up to Chi’s apartment, where his fiancÈe and two of her friends are waiting for him in the driveway.
Inside the apartment, the couple argue about whose turn it is to take care of their son while I sit in the dining room and watch him fearlessly attack the four house cats. In the dark living room, Chi’s roommate, who is white, lounges on the couch in blue boxers, chain-smoking as he half-watches television. Chi’s fiancÈe eventually leaves, after which Chi changes out of his work shirt and mixes a drink for the road. "We’ve been on shaky ground," Chi tells me, referring to his roommate. "He loves me, but I’m committed to someone else. I think he has problems dealing with that. Like I tell him, ‘I care about you, but I can’t be that guy you want.’" What Chi means, I think, is that he can’t be gay.
Chi puts his son in the back seat of the car, and we drive toward Dominos, a black gay bar where we’re supposed to meet Jigga. Chi spends most of the ride complaining about his fiancÈe. His son finally starts crying and kicks the back of Chi’s seat. "Yeah, defend yo mama!" Chi says, laughing. They wait in the car as I walk into Dominos looking for Jigga. The long, rectangular-shaped bar is packed with regulars tonight, mostly middle-aged black men – some openly gay, others on the DL – and a few tough-looking younger guys. Jigga spots me first and waves me over to the bar. He tells me a lot has changed since the first time I met him. He’s in law school now and has put aside the sportswriter idea. And while he is still on the DL (his co-workers and most of his straight friends don’t know he likes guys), he has a serious boyfriend who is also on the DL.
Four months ago, having a serious boyfriend would have been inconceivable to him. "I think I love this dude," he tells me as we walk to the car. "He’s got a lot of attitude, but I kind of like that. We have fistfights all the time, and we don’t stop until somebody has blood. Then we have sex." Jigga laughs as he opens the car door. "But I must really love him, because I never got in fistfights with any of my exes." I’m about to question his definition of love when Chi interjects. "I still need a beer," he says, pointing the way toward a nearby gas station. We pull into a tight parking spot, careful to avoid the young black man with a sideways baseball cap who leans into the car next to us, blocking Chi’s passenger-side door. "Move your ass," Chi says, knocking the kid out of the way with the car door. The boy laughs it off, avoiding a possible confrontation. "I think I hooked up with him," Jigga says, craning his neck from the back seat to get a better look at the kid. "Actually, nah, that’s not him. Looks like him, though."
Recently, Jigga told his parents that he’s interested in both guys and girls. "I was drunk when I told them," he says. "But I’m glad I did. They’ve been really cool about it." It takes me a few seconds to process the words. Really cool about it? In six months of talking to young black gay and DL men, I found that Jigga is one of the few who told his parents, and the only one who reported unconditional acceptance. "I’m blessed," he says. "I realize that. Black parents don’t accept their gay kids.
Black culture doesn’t accept gay people. Why do you think so many people are on the DL?" Jigga is proof that being on the DL isn’t necessarily a lifelong identity. He seems considerably more comfortable with his sexuality than he was the first time I met him, and I suspect that soon enough, he may be openly gay in all facets of his life without losing his much-coveted masculinity. I tell him what I’m thinking. "Who knows, man?" he says. "Two years ago, I wouldn’t have believed that I’d be having sex with guys." Chi opens the car door, cradling a six-pack of beer. "I love beer," he says, smiling. As we drive away, he checks out a young woman stepping out of a nearby Honda Civic. "Damn, that girl is fine!" .
Benoit Denizet-Lewis is a writer living in Boston. His last article for the magazine was about a biological girl living as a boy.
