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King argued that the use of the term "down low" was a way for many African American men to admit to having sex with other men without necessarily identifying as "gay" in the traditional sense. The article was the first mainstream piece to openly criticize negative mainstream media depictions of down-low men and put a different spin on the DL phenomenon. In the summer of 2003, Village Voice contributing writer and NYU professor Jason King published "Remixing the Closet: The Down Low Way of Knowledge", in the newspaper's June 2003 "Queer Issue," a controversial op-ed piece that questioned the relationship between HIV/AIDS and men "on the down low". Nearly all these stories connected the down-low to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the African-American community. Louis Post-Dispatch (April 1), The New York Times (April 3), Chicago Sun-Times (April 22), Atlanta Journal-Constitution (June 3), San Francisco Chronicle (June 4), Village Voice (June 6), VIBE magazine (July), Jet magazine (September 8), Essence magazine (October), San Diego Union-Tribune (December 2), and Los Angeles Times (December 7). They included The New York Times (11 February), USA Today (March 15), Columbus Dispatch (March 19), St. By the end of the year, numerous major media outlets had reported on the down-low. The first mainstream media account of the down-low as closeted homosexuality was reported in the Los Angeles Times on February 7, 2001.
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The term was popularized in the late 1990s and after by a series of mainstream media reports emphasizing the danger of such men transmitting HIV to their unsuspecting female partners. The first known person to use "down-low" in a homosexual context was George Hanna, who used the term in the 1930 song Boy in the Boat about lesbian women. Throughout the gay porn industry and internet networks, "down-low" quickly became a marketing term used to publicize pornographic movies, models, sex-clubs and social gatherings that included Black and Latino men. The term quickly became conflated with an eroticism of Black and Latino homosexual activity. In "Power Plays, Power Works" John Fiske suggests that closeted homosexuality may be more common in American communities suffering from widespread poverty, in which members reportedly depend heavily on traditional family networks (and often religious institutions) for financial and emotional support. In his book Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies and Denial in Black America, Keith Boykin states that secret homosexual relations are not unique to African American men, and in fact occur in many societies and among all races. To them, as to many blacks, that equates to being inherently masculine. Most DL men identify themselves not as gay or bisexual but first and foremost as black. Other DL men form romantic relationships with men and may even be peripheral participants in mainstream gay culture, all unknown to their colleagues and families. Many of these men are young and from the inner city, where they live in a hypermasculine thug culture.
Most date or marry women and engage sexually with men they meet only in anonymous settings like bathhouses and parks or through the Internet. But the creation of an organized, underground subculture largely made up of black men who otherwise live straight lives is a phenomenon of the last decade. There have always been men – black and white – who have had secret sexual lives with men. Rejecting a gay culture they perceive as white and effeminate, many black men have settled on a new identity, with its own vocabulary and customs and its own name: Down Low. A 2003 cover story in The New York Times Magazine on the Down Low phenomenon explains that the Black community sees "homosexuality as a white man's perversion." It then goes on to describe the Down Low culture as follows: In this context, "being on the Down Low" is more than just men having sex with men in secret, or a variant of closeted homosexuality or bisexuality-it is a sexual identity that is, at least partly, defined by its "cult of masculinity" and its rejection of what is perceived as white culture (including white LGBT culture) and terms. Īccording to a study published in the Journal of Bisexuality, "he Down Low is a lifestyle predominately practiced by young, urban Black men who have sex with other men and women, yet do not identify as gay or bisexual". The term originated in the Black community, and was originally used to describe "any kind of slick, secretive behavior, including infidelity in heterosexual relationships".