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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
"I knew the book would do well," said the bestselling novelist E. Lynn Harris, who is gay and has written about black relationships, gay and straight, for over a decade. "Black women are trying to do whatever they can to arm themselves in the fight against AIDS."
"Black women are showing up at my book signings and my presentations, taking over 99 percent of the audience," says King, a tall, strikingly handsome man with an obvious swagger. "They're listening, learning, asking questions, buying six, seven, eight books at a time. Nobody has approached black women at the beauty salons, or wherever they go to talk about this, and now that I'm doing it, and I'm not gay -- I don't look gay, talk gay or act gay -- women are paying attention."
King might not look gay, talk gay or act gay -- but he does have sex with men. And that contradiction gets to the heart of what is so vexing about the down low. D.L. men don't want a relationship with another man, King writes in "On the Down Low," don't consider themselves gay or bi (those are "white" labels) and blame the homophobia of the black community for keeping them in the closet. "In the black community, you cannot be gay and black -- you have to choose," says King. "If you choose to be gay, then you're going to go over there where the white boys are, and be in the white gay culture. You can't be black and gay on the south side of Chicago. You can't be black and gay in Harlem. If you are, then you're looked at like, there's some sissy who's got issues. We've never been taught to accept our sexuality -- we hide it, because we're afraid of the fallout that comes from our churches, our family, our friends and our associations."
It could be this unwillingness to address their sexual behavior, and the semantic gymnastics D.L. men employ to cloak their sexual preferences, that are endangering black women. Health officials say there is definitely a connection -- although they're not sure how strong -- between D.L. behavior and the rise of HIV/AIDS infections in black women. The numbers are arresting: According to a November 2003 report from the CDC, from 1999-2002 African-Americans made up the majority (55 percent) of new cases of HIV: 72 percent of all diagnoses in women and 49 percent in men. The most common way for women to contract the virus -- 77 percent of cases -- is through sex with an infected man. (The CDC is now conducting studies that focus on D.L. men.)
King says he wrote the book to warn black women about the D.L., and the possibility that their partners could be sleeping with men on the sly -- and maybe even infecting them with HIV. But critics point out that his theory is based on unquantifiable information: No one knows how many men are on the D.L., or how many of those men are HIV positive. And no one knows how many black women who contracted the virus from heterosexual sex got it from HIV positive partners on the D.L.
Instead of focusing on who may or may not be on the D.L., says Chicago-based HIV activist and Baptist minister Rae Lewis Thornton -- who was infected with HIV from a man in 1986 -- we should be talking about African-Americans and sexuality. "King has made a lot of money and scared the hell out of a lot of black women," says Thornton. "But it makes all black men the bad guy. It's not that we can't trust black men -- that isn't what the discussion should be about. It's about, how do we address homosexuality in the black community?"
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"On the Down Low" is in part a self-help guide for black women with instructions on what "signs" to look for in their partner. (Pay attention to your intuition; be aware of his schedule and where he is at all times; watch out for overtly homophobic comments; change up your schedule once in a while and "drop in" on him at work.) But it is also a confessional memoir. King goes into great detail about the double life he led for years -- sleeping with a guy he met at the gas station on the way home from his girlfriend's house; picking up guys at churches and adult bookstores -- and about the countless betrayals, and the guilt he eventually felt for hurting the women who loved him.
When pushed, King identifies as bisexual, even though he'd rather "just identify as 'J.L.'" -- which seems contradictory, coming from someone who advocates clarity and honesty about sexual identity. (He has a girlfriend, he says, who knows that he has sex with men.) "When you tell people you're bisexual, the only thing they think is, 'you have sex with men?'" says King. "Right now in my community, two men having sex means gay," he says. "And that's not a correct assumption."
