This message comes from the Science of Happiness. Science shows that love is expansive. Academy Award winner Gina Davis explores why people love, how love grows, and how it sustains them. Subscribe to the Science of Happiness wherever you get your podcasts. This was never about the health of Black women. This was about creating a boogeyman, which is the hyper-sexualized, dangerous Black man who walks around horny and just destroying everything with his lust. And so it becomes almost like a community criminal, right? But the reality is that most Black gay men, one point in our lives, we were DL. Allow me to take you back for a second to the daytime TV of yesteryear. The year is 2004. I remember sitting in my living room, well, my parents' living room, watching Oprah with my mom. And there was this conversation about DL men. That's men on the down low, meaning that they are discreet or secretive about having sex with other men. Not even let's have any kind of relationship beyond sex. If I was gay, yes. But when you're on a DL, all you want to do is have sex. It's about gratification, not orientation. That was 2004. But now it's 2026. And if you open up TikTok right now, you'll hear the same thing. OK, so how does it look if your man is DL? So this is something important for us to talk about. The DL man is a recurring character in Black culture. Someone who comes up in messy story times as a cautionary tale or even as a reason to explain away bad behavior from straight men. If he beats on women, I promise you he's DL. So I'm trying to understand, what is it about our culture and maybe this moment specifically that has us so obsessed with the dealings of DL men? Specifically at a time when people are being surveilled and scrutinized for their sexual behavior. To find out, I'm joined by Dr. Jeffrey McCune, author of Sexual Discretion, Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing. Thank you for having us. And Kai Wright, a journalist and host for The Guardian who has been writing about sexual politics for the last 30 years. Thank you, Brittany. I am so happy to have you both. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. Today, we're going to talk about men on the down low. So who are the first people using this term on the down low? And what kind of person were they describing? Yeah. It's so important to identify the down low as a vernacular term used within Black communities to describe things that we did very discreetly, right? Hello. Yes. Like if you're getting information you weren't supposed to have. Yes. Maybe if someone were to buy boosted goods, let's say. On the look. On the deal. Yes. And then it moved into, you know, sexual discreet. Right. And so, you know, I got this girl number on the down low. You know, I got this dude's number on the down low. This notion of the down low was really current within Black communities. And then in the late 90s, early 2000s, moved into a kind of popular cultural term. Right. But I like to say that it's really important to think about the download even further than the 1980s and 90s, like the Underground Railroad was a download activity to keep us out of the harm of surveillance. And so the politics of the DL for me are historic. It's a way to keep out of the lines of harm and also surveillance. I would say, you know, as somebody who was writing about sexual politics and intersections of race and politics in the 90s, the first time I was asked to explain outside of the community what is down low was in fact when a guy named J.L. King wrote a book that became a bestseller because he was booked on Oprah Winfrey in 2004 to go on and talk about the book. And he presented himself as a down-low man, which he described as somebody who was secretly having sex with men, even though outwardly his life was as a straight black man. And just to make sure we're on the same page, it sounds to me like being DL is distinct from being discreet. Or closeted. Yeah, I think that we had reached a point where there is widely accepted and understood that people had identity around their sexuality, right? But this was a group of people who did not have identity around their sexual behavior. Their behavior and their identity were distinct things, which is different from somebody who is just in the closet, you know, who's saying, look, I think of myself as gay. I just don't want you to know that. Hmm. Got it. So just to, again, make sure we're on the same page, DL men might have sex with other men, but do not identify as gay. Why did that distinction of having sex with men, but not being gay, why did that matter to people? Because it was a moment in which the Black community was finally starting to understand how big a deal the HIV epidemic was for us specifically, and how high the infection rates were amongst Black women. And looking for explanations for why that was happening, where was that coming from, the answer became, oh, this must be because of these DL men. Which was proven to be a large misconception. It's not true that DL men were responsible for the high HIV rates in black women. And if you want to know more about that you can actually check out an episode we just did about safer sex But back to this Oprah episode This came out in 2004 and I started college at HBCU in Washington D in 2005 Truly that framing from that one episode of Oprah and the way that it started, A Million Barbershop and Beauty Salon Conversations, you know, being a young Black woman and HBCU in Washington, D.C., where at that time, the HIV transmission rates were of the highest in the country. And there was especially concern about the diagnosis rates and transmission rates for Black women who had sex with men. And so, you know, at that time, I could tell that among my classmates and the girls in my dorm, there was a lot of panic, not so much about the actual, perhaps unprotected sex that they were having with the guys in their life, but more so about, like the imagined unprotected sex that other men were having with other men who might have been only one or two degrees separated from them. Does that make sense? Yeah. It makes entire sense. Makes a lot of sense. And I really want to like hone in on the kind of way in which the rising rates of HIV amongst Black women worked in tandem with the kind of what I call the pop version of the DL, right? The DL becomes used as a ploy to get us to move our attention away from so-called sexual behavior, sexual health, sexual wellness, right? To a so-called DL character. And for me, that does two things. It allows us to be distracted from the ways in which we can really save Black women's lives, we know that a very small percentage of men are DL men who actually have sex with women, right? And so that's one piece that we knew then, and we still know that today. But the other piece that we know is intravenous drug use was also at its increase, and that also created transmission in different ways. So I think we got hoodwinked, if you will, by this whole kind of conversation that Oprah was having and lost kind of focus on the health and wellness of the whole Black community. And I think we really cannot understate this. It's to put a fine point on it. This was never about the health of Black women. This was about creating a boogeyman, the latest version of something we are very familiar with, which is the hyper-sexualized, dangerous Black man who walks around horny and just destroying everything with his lust. And that has, we put that on straight black men, we put that on gay black men. That is part of the way we have slandered black men for 300 years. So when people are talking about, like, even just a cursory search of social media, you will see white people talking about DL this and DL that, which to me feels like a big shift. But when people are talking about a DL man today, what do you think they're describing? What I think we have today, right, we've got lost in this kind of commercialized version of the DL. And the only way we do that is through these kind of salacious narratives, right? I know this man, he was married to, you know, this famous beauty queen. And then he got with this famous producer director man. And oh my God, I got to tell this story. I need to expose him. right? And so it becomes almost like a community criminal, right? But the reality is that most Black gay men, one point in our lives, we were DL. DL in the sense that we were discreet because we didn't want anybody to do harm to our bodies, to kind of provoke us in the church, to provoke us in our community. We didn't want anybody to actually bash us. So the safest way to be was discreet, right? And so the notion that so many Black gay men now are like online trying to expose DL men, I always ask, go back 30 years with yourself or 20 years with yourself. Would you have wanted somebody to expose your development into sexuality? And I look at the discourse today online around DL folks, what I find notable is how adjacent it is to anti-trans discourse. Oh, say more about that. That you see them side by side. We are obsessed in this culture with false binaries and particularly with false binaries around race, gender, and sexuality. You have to stay inside whatever box we have decided exists for that category because those boxes exist in order to create a caste system. And anybody whose existence challenges the boundaries of those boxes, it becomes an outcast in society. People start coming for them. And people whose sexual behavior and sexual identity don't match challenged the idea of like, there's straight people and there's gay people, and here's how they get ranked in society. And I don't think it is coincidental when you think of it that way, that right now you would see this surge in conversation about DL men when we are in a moment of retrenchment around caste in the United States. That is what this moment politically and culturally is about. The Trump movement is about, can we put everybody back in the boxes in which they belong so that we can rank them and say who's on top and who's on bottom? And so in that culture, in that moment, lo and behold, here comes the DL monster again as this weird thing that doesn't stay where it's supposed to stay. You know, I'm glad you're bringing this up. It makes me think of something I saw recently on social media, which is this viral content creator called the DL Whisperer. Part of his whole thing is teaching, you know, straight women how to identify DL men, which is, that's his own thing. And then on top of that, though, to your point, Kai, He also has a lot of anti-trans rhetoric. And very recently he expressed a desire to physically fight T Madison For those who don know T Madison is I mean she a diva of all trades but most prominently she does a lot of like hosting podcasting work television she's acted. Many people might remember her as being featured prominently on Beyonce's Renaissance album. She's somebody who is very out proud about her entire journey as a Black trans woman. So it doesn't surprise me, based on what you just shared, that his anti-trans rhetoric is also existing aside this, you know, pull the curtain back on all these DL men, and I'm going to teach you women how to deal with it. We did reach out to the DL whisperer for comment, but he did not immediately respond. And it just makes me sad, honestly, Brittany, when I see any kind of nominally queer discourse that is about reinserting us into boxes and policing us in boxes, it is just, it is deeply, deeply disappointing. Yeah, and I think, you know, one of the things you're pointing to, Kai, that I really like is there have always been DL men, trade, right, men who have sex with men who don't identify as being gay or bisexual in our communities, right? But it's now profitable to expose those men on social media, on television, across the internet. It's profitable. But for me, I'm really trying to understand what are the motivations for people who want to create new black criminals. Because I'm not one of them. I'm not interested in creating some new black criminals. We got enough folks. You know? New Black criminals. Coming up. But somehow the DL codes for a certain kind of truculent masculinity, a kind of like, dare I say, thug masculinity or lay it down masculinity, that people are, as much as they are repelling this, they are attracted to it. Stay with us. this message comes from there's more to that a podcast from the smithsonian magazine with an insatiable curiosity host Ari Daniels covers history science and culture subscribe to there's more to that and find out how much more there is to almost everything Jonathan Haidt's book the anxious generation sparked a movement to warn kids and their parents about the harms of social media. Yes, my claim is that we'll change brain development in ways that will make you less capable, confident, happy, and sociable as an adult. But what do young people think? Gen Z is just going to think, well, we're cursed. That's on the TED Radio Hour. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. On Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, it's not so much we get to talk to celebrities, it's that we get to talk to celebrities about other celebrities, like we did with actor Nathan Lane. I remember having to tell George C. Scott that I was leaving the show to do this musical. And he said to me, you're leaving me to do a magic show. Listen to Wait Wait in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. LifeKit can help you change your life in record time. In just about 20 minutes, a LifeKit episode gives you evidence-based tips you can put into practice that day. No fast forwarding to get to the good stuff. Just smart, straightforward advice right away. Listen to the Life Kit podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, these days the term DL is sort of used as a catch-all term to define people of all backgrounds who are closeted in some way. But why is race important when it comes to talking about who or what a DL man is? With these terms, they do start to lose meaning over time. And so, like, if you go on the apps, there are men of all kinds of walks of life. They're calling themselves DL, including very openly gay men, you know, who are like, today I'm DL, you know. Tomorrow, who knows? Tomorrow, who knows? And that I kind of, I love, you know, like, to be honest, like, you know, like, everybody try on what you need to do. try on today. That's great. But the problematic DL conversation that recurs is necessarily about Black people because it, again, is a character that is this vessel in which we pour a wide variety of fears and fantasies about Black male sexuality into, as opposed to having conversations about those things. Can I add something that I think that we can't leave this conversation without talking about how the DL has historically also coded a certain relationship to masculinity? Yeah. So somehow masculinity is tethered to who you sleep with. And we know there's a range of masculinities even amongst heterosexual men, right? I go to churches all the time. There's a range, baby especially in the south right true you know but somehow the dl codes for a certain kind of truculent masculinity a kind of like dare i say thug masculinity or lay it down masculinity that people are as much as they are uh repelling this they are attracted to it and so the reason why it stays popular is because i also want to like i said i can't leave this conversation without talking about the DL as a sexy metaphor. Oh. That's right. The imaginings of the DL is all about this kind of image of this really tall, dark, and handsome brother in the shadows, right? And there's a reason. There's a reason. Because that is also sexual. That is also sexy, as Jeffrey is pointing out. Absolutely. Absolutely. Why does the idea of the DL man fascinate people so much, especially straight people? Like who benefits and who is harmed by the existence of the DL trope and all the attendant myths We all harmed by the existence of this trope because it is the thing we do instead of having the conversations around desire that we need to have And so that leaves us all less joyful and less safe. We need to be creating a sexual culture where everybody through a whole range of sexual behaviors and identities are able to express their desire and have consensual relationships around it. There is a world in which black women are expected to exist in relationships where they don't have consent. They cannot give consent to what their male partner is doing when he's not at home. And those are terrible problems that need to be addressed. But the solutions to those are more complicated and harder than creating this DL monster. He is not explaining the problems in your relationship. So he's not the number one reason why you're having man problems. And from a simple fact base, we know from data, it's absolutely not the cause of HIV infection rates. But what happens, though, inadvertently, is because there's such a small population of men who have sex with men and women, right? Right. Inadvertently, what actually happens is a resurgence of homophobia against black gay men. Right. Because who are these men supposedly having sex with? The husbands are having sex with so-called black gay men. Right. And so again, the Black gay man becomes the enemy of the heterosexual relationship. And so for me, what I'm really concerned with is that we're once again giving license to a certain kind of homophobia within our community and advancing this kind of antagonism towards Black gay men as being these kind of mysterious lures, right? We're luring these preachers into the closets of sexuality. We're luring these businessmen into the bathhouses of the streets of blah, blah, blah, blah. Like all of these mythologies that keep running wild. And the D.L. Whisperer is one of the people who, of course, advances that. Right? Well, also, too, I mean, there's also like something that shows up a lot in popular culture. I mean, I'm thinking about, of course, the Tyler Perry film for colored girls. Who's doing the bending? Yes, with the famous line, who's doing the bending, where Janet Jackson's character, she receives a positive HIV diagnosis. And the audience is supposed to understand that this happened because her husband was stepping out on her with another man. Or even thinking about like Insecure, the HBO show where Molly's big issue with the guy she's dating is that he's openly bisexual and was comfortable telling her about dating a man in the past. Like she has the idea that there's some black gay man in the past that is a threat to their current heterosexual romance and their possible future. Like these ideas are reproduced through entertainment and are making people a lot of money. So, you know, as you all say, it's not just the DL whisperer online. It's not just the conversations that people are having amongst themselves in real life. This is also something that is fascinating enough to a general, predominantly straight audience that this boogeyman is reproduced over and over again in culture. And this brings me to a question. You know, it seems like the DL archetype is a form of misplaced fears and anxieties. What is a more productive way to think about the way some Black men are navigating their sexual and social lives? I think one of the productive ways is to understand that men who have sex with men who do not want to actually take on the moniker gay or bisexual is actually announcing to our community how the terms gay and bisexual are treated. Right. If, in fact, we lived in communities wherein being gay and being bisexual was celebrated. Not just accepted. I want to note that you used the word celebrated. Yeah, was celebrated, was acknowledged, was seen. If we could actually have that kind of community, then we would have folks who might be more able to be visible and public. Now, I say might because folks who are discreet about any identity still have to answer to an anti-Black world that continues to police and surveil them and do violence. But in the Black community, I think one of the things that we can do is create the conditions under which celebration is our first move as we think about people's articulations of identity. Kai, Jeffrey, I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you both so much. Thank you so much, Brittany. Thank you. Thank you. This is riveting. That was Dr. Jeffrey McCune, author of Sexual Discretion, Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing, and Kai Wright, a journalist and host for The Guardian who has been writing about sexual politics for the last 30 years. This episode of It's Been a Minute was produced by Corey Antonio Rose. This episode was edited by Nina Potok. Our supervising producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sanguini. All right, that's all for this episode of It's Been a Minute from NPR. I'm Brittany Luce. Talk soon. I met this guy on the bar train one time, and I had my bass with me, and he goes, man, what do you want to do? What's your dream? I'm Jesse Thorn, on Bullseye, Raphael Sadiq. He's nominated for an Oscar, he played bass for Prince, and of course, he co-founded Tony, Tony, Tony. Uncle, I want to be in a band with my brother. That's on the next Bullseye. Find us in the NPR app at MaximumFun.org or wherever you get podcasts.
