USA Today; Arlington, Va.; Mar 15, 2001; Steve Sternberg;
Black women think he's Prince Charming: well-paid, well-educated, nicely dressed, active in church and devoted to family.
Yet, there's something the women don't know and maybe never will: He's secretly having sex with men. What's more, he might bring home an unwelcome guest -- HIV, the AIDS virus.
This is life "on the down low," and many black men are living it.
"I call it the secret society," says Jim King, who describes himself as a life member. "It's a culture that represents probably millions of men around the country. It's huge -- from the pulpit to the police force."
Some men of all races, not just blacks, secretly have sex with men. But for many reasons, the problem is particularly troublesome for those battling the AIDS epidemic in the black community. Perhaps the most important is the speed with which HIV is spreading among black women. At the same time, men on the "down low" see themselves as heterosexual, so they ignore safe-sex warnings aimed at gay or bisexual men.
Some of those on the "down low" apparently learned to like sex with men in prison and began dual sex lives after being released, an admission few will ever make, given the power of the black community's taboos against revealing too much and personal concerns about self-preservation.
King, 44, an HIV-prevention consultant from Columbus, Ohio, is a divorced father of three grown children who describes himself as "active in my community, in my church and a very respected member of society."
He has traveled the country on business for years having sexual encounters with men and women. He concedes that infidelity ended his marriage. If his children know the truth about their father, King says, they never bring it up.
He says he decided to go public -- despite "the homophobia of the black community" -- because AIDS is decimating black families, and he knows that some of the men he calls "DL brothers" must be spreading the virus.
King wants to wake women up to the possibility that some of the men they meet also frolic with other men. "Someone in the black community needs to say, 'Hey man, you're destroying your family.' "
HIV has devastated thousands of black families since the epidemic emerged almost two decades ago. Since then, federal epidemiologists have logged more than 754,000 AIDS cases nationwide -- about 283,000 of them among blacks. Although they represent just 12% of the population, blacks make up 37% of all reported AIDS cases.
Overall, researchers estimate that one of every 50 black men and one in 160 black women in the USA are infected with HIV, though scores have not yet been tested. Some health officials believe that "DL brothers" may be one reason that black women account for almost two-thirds of AIDS cases among women.
Michael Sainte-Andress, a health educator for the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington, D.C., knows firsthand what it's like to live the nightmare of HIV/AIDS.
"My family has buried three people as a result of this disease," says Sainte-Andress, who has AIDS himself and has lost a brother, nephew and cousin.
More than half of AIDS cases among black men now occur in those who have sex with other men, up from 31% in 1989. Using dirty syringes to inject illegal drugs ranks second. Fewer than 10% of the AIDS cases among black men result from heterosexual sex, compared with 38% among women. One study of Job Corps entrants found that HIV was about seven times more prevalent among young black women than among white or Hispanic women.
Many HIV-positive women have had sex with infected drug abusers, but some may have become infected by unwittingly having sex with men on the "down low."
These men do not consider themselves gay or bisexual. They think of themselves as heterosexual men who like to have sex with men for a change.
"It is clearly a culture that is masculine in nature," says Whitman-Walker's executive director Cornelius Baker. "They are closeted men who identify themselves as straight. The rest of the world identifies them as straight because they are involved in relationships with women."
Illogical as it may seem, he says, many don't think themselves susceptible to HIV, believing that it is an affliction of white gay men and black drug abusers.
Raenard Brown, 49, an HIV-positive openly gay man from Washington, D.C., had affairs with three married men before he settled into a faithful relationship with his lover of 13 years. For four years as a young man, Brown abandoned his gay lifestyle for the love of a woman, who bore him a son, now grown. Fortunately, that was before he became infected. The woman and his son are HIV-free.
Men living dual lives
No one knows how many black men live dual lives, but clues have emerged from government surveys. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of 8,780 HIV-positive men who have sex with men found that 24% of the black men identified themselves as heterosexual, compared with 15% of Latinos and 6% of whites.
Another CDC study, this one of 3,492 young gay and bisexual men, found that one in six recently had sex with women -- and nearly 25% of those men recently had unprotected sex with both men and women.
Most are secretive, fearing that disclosure will cost them their jobs, their standing in the community and their families. "Now there's the 'ultra' down low, the UDL. That means 'Don't speak of it at all,' " says E. Lynn Harris, whose groundbreaking 1991 novel Invisible Lives shocked men and women alike with a portrayal of a black man's awakening bisexuality -- and of an all-too-common consequence, a college-bound woman whose life is cut short by AIDS.
"I knew bisexuality was prominent in my community, but no one talked about it," Harris says. "We don't really talk about sex at all."
That began to change with the publication of Invisible Life.
"Sisters were having 'Invisible Life' parties, sharing experiences," Sainte-Andress of Whitman-Walker says. "But they didn't want to jump. In our society, women are socialized to be long- suffering and bear the brunt."
Why is this culture so secretive? "We come from grandparents who said, 'What happens in this house, stays in this house,' " says Sandra McDonald, founder of Health Outreach in Atlanta. "That's the way we operate."
And why do the "DL brothers" insist they're heterosexual? "Blacks, particularly black men, have been labeled in so many ways that are degrading," Whitman-Walker's Baker says. "For many black men, (the word) gay (is synonymous) with being white, and many don't want to be labeled as that."
King is writing a pamphlet, "Secrets: The Official Handbook of the Lifestyles of African-American Men who Have Sex with Men," which he hopes will pierce the veil. He has identified personality types typical of "DL brothers," including the Rough Neck Player; the most sought-after male; the Brooks Brothers Brother, a professional who "will only deal with other men at his level or higher"; and the Bi- Curious Brother, who has done prison time and likes to let someone perform sex acts on him. His excuse: curiosity.
Admittedly, these personality types are generalizations, not verities of sociological research. But King has hit on a nugget of common experience that may influence some men: prison.
"In the younger generation," says McDonald, "45% of young African- American males are being incarcerated. When they return from that (prison) experience, they're not going to say 'I had sex with several men.' That's a taboo conversation. It's difficult for us to have that conversation, but this epidemic is forcing us to start, to save lives."
No public health agency has figured out how to warn men on the "down low" about the risks they're courting. For one thing, no one knows who they are. That's why King and author Harris are aiming their messages at women. Their suggestions: Ask your man about his sexual history. Don't agree to sex unless he wears a condom. Suggest he get an HIV test.
After years of relative silence, many black leaders have begun speaking up about AIDS and the toll it takes. Former New York mayor David Dinkins, who held the office from 1989 until 1993 and is now a professor of public affairs at Columbia University, says some black clergymen, like some of their white counterparts, saw HIV as "God's way of punishing people for misbehaving."
Those attitudes have begun to yield under the relentless pressure of AIDS. The Rev. Calvin Butts of New York's Abyssinian Baptist Church recently delivered a blistering sermon aimed at those "lying about their sexuality, claiming to be heterosexual when they are homosexual or bisexual." He observed: "They could be taking home a disease that is fatal to their loved ones." Although some listeners laughed, Butts says, nervous tittering wasn't the only response.
"People who have been burned by this understand," he says. "While the laughter's loud, you may look into the crowd and see someone crying."
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