One Baltimore-area Craigslist ad, for example, uses the term “DL” several times alongside the terms “masculine” and “straight-acting.” According to Davis, those attributes are desirable to many gay men.īut while the language of the down low can afford us a certain glimpse at gay black identity, some researchers suggest the term’s use says more about racial forces at play in the wider culture. It’s a coded way for men to say, “I’m looking to have sex with men, but I don’t act or talk like the stereotype.” Profiles on gay hook-up apps such as Grindr and classified advertising websites including Craigslist show that far from being a term of stigma, “the DL” seems to carry a certain mystique and a cultural clout in many gay communities. McCune wants society to move past the DL as a racial construct and understand it as a “tool of negotiation” utilized by many different church cultures.ĭeWayne Davis, senior pastor of All God’s Children Metropolitan Community Church in Minneapolis summed it up this way: “Are we painting a picture of closeted black men that is more pernicious than other men?” Churches require black men to be DL.”īut McCune added that churches require this of white men, too. The black church, he said, is a “social space of high constraint, which produces the necessity for this secret. Jeffrey McCune, who has written scholarly work on the down low phenomenon, offers several reasons for it. McCormick insists that his experiences were not out of the mainstream, and that men having sex with men in the black church is more or less an open secret. “If you ever need a boyfriend, you could come to a COGIC convention and leave with two or three, and some of the best sex you’ve ever had,” said the comedian in a phone interview.
and a predominantly African-American church, is full of men who have sex with men. Gay comedian and activist Sampson McCormick said the Church of God in Christ, the largest Pentecostal denomination in the U.S. But while many take issue with the connection between HIV and the DL, the connection between the DL and black church seems more difficult to dispute.
This combination of HIV infection, secretive black men, and the black church grabbed attention. In a 2006 book, Pastor Michael Stevens called the down low an “invisible disease” plaguing black churches, and outlined a plan of healing for those black men who wanted out. Public interest in the topic only intensified when some journalists began connecting the DL phenomenon to HIV infection rates in black communities, which are disproportionately higher than among whites. Since the early 2000s, the topic of black men who have sex with men but identify as straight has been heavily discussed in major American media outlets. King wasn’t the first writer to tackle the topic, but he quickly became one of its leading voices after Oprah invited him on her show later that year to “blow the lid off” of the secret. What King knew from the lingering eye contact was that the black man he found in church was, like himself, “on the down low,” a phrase widely used to describe black men who secretly have sex with other men while leading publicly straight lives.
King describes a scene common in some black churches: “I spotted this brother from my pew, ten rows back,” he writes. By Brandon Ambrosino | Religion News Service September 4, 2015