Sexual Discretion

Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing

Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr.

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780226096674
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

African American men who have sex with men while maintaining a heterosexual lifestyle in public are attracting increasing interest from both the general media and scholars. Commonly referred to as "down-low" or "DL" men, many continue to have relationships with girlfriends and wives who remain unaware of their same-sex desires, and in much of the media, DL men have been portrayed as carriers of HIV who spread the virus to black women. Sexual Discretion explores the DL phenomenon, offering refreshingly innovative analysis of the significance of media, space, and ideals of black masculinity in understanding down low communities.In Sexual Discretion, Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr. provides the first in-depth examination of how the social expectations of black masculinity intersect and complicate expressions of same-sex affection and desire. Within these underground DL communities, men aren't as highly policed—and thus are able to maintain their public roles as "properly masculine." McCune draws from sources that range from R&B singer R. Kelly's epic hip-hopera series Trapped in the Closet to Oprah's high-profile exposé on DL subculture; and from E. Lynn Harris's contemporary sexual passing novels to McCune's own interviews and ethnography in nightclubs and online chat rooms. Sexual Discretion details the causes, pressures, and negotiations driving men who rarely disclose their intimate secrets.

TWO

Yo’ Daddy’s Dysfunctional: Risk, Blame, and Necessary Fictions in Down-Low Discourse

. . . the statistics—figures—regarding HIV infection are fraught with complications, not merely because they are changing so rapidly, but because they have an uncanny way of slipping into figuration. This means two things: on the one hand, these numbers seem to lift off the page and signify to us something other than literal, living, dying men and women. On the other hand, they are often read too literally—as representing the “reality” of a situation that is in fact much more complex, and implicates many more people.

—Barbara Browning, Infectious Rhythms: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture

We have to get used to these anxieties, this mathematics of probability intruding into our intimate concerns, this bogus objectivity, this coding of risks in our present culture. If anyone ever thought that the complex coding of taboos was more restrictive, the work of the modern safety officer should give them pause.

—Mary Douglas, Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory

Where is the origin of this robust interest in and anxiety over black male discreet (bi)sexual acts? For me, it began with a candid conversation at Starbucks, where a woman told me that “there is so little information out here on these [DL] men, that anything seems helpful.” Her search for, and acceptance of, “anything” alerted me to what would be the complex consumption of discursive material around the “down low” (DL). As the DL arose out of media texts as a sexual nomenclature, it became the new buzzword for racially deviant sexuality—the blame for the rising spread of HIV/ AIDS—a product of “spectacular consumption.”¹ In the course of a year, the DL moved from being the ironic, contradictory, and paradoxical hip-hop “homo-thug” of simple intrigue to the linchpin in the 2001 report that black women comprised 64 percent of all new HIV/AIDS cases among U.S. women.² Somehow, the previously unknown “homo-thug” was pegged as the culprit of transmission, and “Brothas on the Down Low” became the metonym for the new plague within many black houses. In other words, as the discourse transitioned from a more oxymoronic term (homo-thug) to one from within the black vernacular (down low, or DL), there was more attention given to how these men allegedly infected and endangered black women, as well as threatened the imagined stability of black heteronormativity. This threat to black women—and particularly the black heterosexual, often middle-class family—issued an alarm that would spark articles in almost every major news press in this country (USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, St. Louis Dispatch), black magazines (Essence, Ebony, Jet), as well as mainstream television (ER, Law & Order, Girlfriends), including the incomparable Oprah Winfrey Show. As discursive interests spread throughout the country, the myth that the DL threatened to infect all facets of black life spread concomitantly. The possibility for media to propel a myth of DL ubiquity and contagion speaks to the power of discourse in the construction of not only social fear, but also social drama. In some senses, sexual discretion performed by these men—the unavailability of their narratives to the public—conjured a discursive frenzy to piece a cultural puzzle together, without proper context and consideration. And like a drama without clear characters, the plot thickens in conjunction with a historical, social, and political imaginary.

The beginning of a discursive explosion almost always determines the future of a “thing.”³ The media has taught us most of what we know about the DL and black men’s sexual desire and discretion. In this chapter, I attend to constructions and contradictions present within media that frame DL men and attempt to make sense of black men’s sexuality and sexual discretion. Mostly I am interested in the conversation that media discourses forge between the public imaginary and black men’s lives. Norman Fairclough illuminates the scope and importance of critical discourse analysis:

Critical discourse analysis of a communicative event is the analysis of the relationships between three dimensions or facets of that event, which I can call text, discourse practice, and sociocultural practice. (1995, 57)

I am interested in these dimensions and attend to how the consequence, or punishment, for contemporary sexual-passing performances⁴ is constructed in terms of disease. This construction of the “new black phenomenon” as the blame for the disheartening and startling HIV/AIDS rates is not only a response to the reasonable fear that black women are at high risk, but also the historic tradition of panic over the health of the black family.⁵ Most importantly, this defense of family rhetoric appropriates the narrative of dysfunctionality, historically ascribed to black women, and inscribes this fiction upon black male bodies. This so-called discursive strategy frames black men as irresponsible figures within a heterosexual sphere; thus, in some ways rewarding black women while punishing black men.⁶ Whereas the Moynihan report attributed much of the detriment of the black family to black women playing “untraditional” roles, in a moment of perceived high black female mobility, it is easy to flip this narrative—using the DL as an example of how black men destroy black families. Unfortunately, the DL arrived at a time when black men were already stricken with the image of “deadbeat dad,” “absent father,” and “irresponsible partner.” These images, while mythological and not metonymic, collaborate with the DL and prescribe a strong formula for the doom of black community health and welfare. My start here, at the place of discursive demonization, is informed by my being in the ethnographic thick of things—watching the discourse unfold, urging a greater engagement of how the men understand themselves and work in contrast to these questionable and dangerous characterizations.

I first realized this reconfiguration of the black family destruction narrative in the DL context when I encountered a privately produced DL-targeted “outreach” poster. The “prevention” poster has an image of a smiling young black girl with her chin resting on her knuckles (as if thinking) and reads:

You Hurt My Mommy!

It’s more than just about you

Always Practice Safer Sex

Beyond the problematic use of a young prepubescent girl in the service of sexual welfare, the poster speaks loudly to and points directly at men who infect black women via heterosexual sex. The young girl asks on behalf of the mother, as an innocent yet personal representative of the mother’s “hurt”—a result of the black man’s, or her daddy’s, dysfunctional behavior. Here, the narrative of the father acting out recalls not only a historical understanding of black men’s natural inclination toward deviance, but suggests an intent to do harm to black women. The young girl’s body is used as a tactic to invoke empathy and sympathy, and a punitive gaze from those who identify with her concern for her “mommy,” while also sympathizing with her obscure awareness of what Daddy did to Mommy.

However, one of the most problematic components of this construction is how it assumes that DL men are selfishly (“It’s more than just about you”) acting out their sexual desire, without concern or care for the women with whom they may, or may not, be involved. In addition, it presumes that DL men have kids and participate in heterosexual sex. Largely, this is representative of the DL discourse. This representation has become the template of the DL type: a black man who has sex with men, who lies to his wife/ girlfriend, putting them at risk for sexually transmitted diseases. This poster is emblematic of how DL discourse and various other “official” discourses are highly informed by the mythologies and historical constructions surrounding black men’s sexual behaviors and historical constructions, rather than the DL men’s sociosexual realities. As the subtitle of this chapter suggests, “risk, blame, and necessary fictions” are at the center of DL discourse. For this reason, this chapter is organized to illuminate how “risks” and “threat” are constructed as media engage in reading DL men’s culture; the role of blame (and shame) as a (dis)empowering technique for those who enter DL discourse in search of power, or “mission work”;⁷ ultimately, this discourse—predicated upon the misconstruction of risk and threat—relies upon the necessary fiction of black women as non-agents and passive victims, who are solely the recipients of black men’s disease and pathology. Together, these demonizing inscriptions upon the black male body mark him and the larger black community as dysfunctional—substantiating the urgency of a moral and health crisis.

Indeed, DL discourse explains more about the working ideologies among consumers of DL discourse than the complex network of male subjects who engage in same-sex desire “down low.” In this way, the thirst for any possible knowledge about this “new (sexual) phenomenon” is akin to the common excitement over anything representatively black. As the DL subject has arisen out of a media context, as well as been sustained within this domain, the so-called DL phenomenon can more aptly be understood as what John Fiske calls a “media event,” in which “we can no longer rely on a stable relationship between a ‘real event’ and its mediated representation” (1996, 2). The DL has been constructed as a new phenomenon—a construction I challenge in all parts of this project—while also being framed as the “major vector of HIV/AIDS contagion within the black community” (Browning 1998, 12). Important here is that neither claim has ever been empirically or socially substantiated. Indeed, the DL story is not simply a representation but “has its own reality” (Fiske 1996, 2). This narrative is a summation of historic understandings of sexualized black bodies, contemporary mythologies around disease and contagion, as well as a by-product of certain perpetuations of hysteria by those who understand themselves as the “safety officers” of the black community and, more often, black women’s bodies. While there are some differences between black and dominant media coverage of the DL in terms of perspective, much of the representation acts like ready-made press material, constructing a slightly modified version of black men acting out. At the core of DL representation is the need to make sense of the seemingly hyper-presence of disease; DL men provide a convenient sense of clarity and a body upon which we can inscribe blame. In one of the epigraphs that begins this chapter, anthropologist Mary Douglas clearly predicts the moment of down-low frenzy that now preoccupies much of media’s discussions of HIV/AIDS within the black community. Sexuality outside of heterosexuality is, still indeed, a taboo subject in American society. Sexual taboos undeniably facilitate and encourage comfort in more normative sexualities, pushing all outside performances to the margins in order to retain some kind of moral center. When non-heterosexual relationships are placed at the margins, they are removed from having the cultural intelligibility that is often associated with normative sexuality. As a result, many rely on the decoding of sexual taboos by those whom they believe to have greater knowledge, or authority, in terms of discussing sexuality and its complexities. In the case of DL men—or any performance of non-normative sexuality—media, health officials, and self-appointed “experts” are too often the generators of inaccurate and incomplete explanations of queer sexual presences for the general public. Most pointedly, media, along with its texts, is often accepted as the authority on issues of sexuality, removing the power from the voice of the actual sexual subject, neglecting more nuanced discussions of the sociocultural aspects of our constructions of sexual identities. Instead, DL discourse provides a necessary fiction that attempts to reconcile the enigmatic nature of the sexual uncertainty within our society. Public and official discourse, in this case, work in tandem to explicate not only what constitutes the DL, but also how it functions in relationship to what is often thought to be the sexually certain—heterosexuality. Often we use the ideological tools given by history and contemporary constructions of blackness to do what Ronald Jackson II (2006) has referred to as “scripting the black body.” Here, the DL is scripted not only with the cultural baggage of the demonized and dangerous male of yesterday, but also with the threat to the future of black community wellbeing.

This chapter looks closely at the rhetorical implications of media discourse around the DL—how the black male body is scripted—the dual effect of media representation on hetero/homo constructions of community. I am interested in the seemingly insistent effacing of the complexity of sexuality, for the sake of uncovering the potential mystery of the rapid growth of HIV/ AIDS in black America. Media, and even state agencies, enact three types of violence in their public renderings of the “official” DL narrative: (1) As the DL is labeled a new black phenomenon, which is dangerous and a spin-off of the homo-thug, it unfairly constructs black queer, and non-queer, men as being sexually irresponsible, peculiar, criminal, and generally dysfunctional; (2) when the rising HIV/AIDS rates among black women are placed as central to public inquiry, black women are positioned as convenient conduits for demonizing black men—enabling continued gender tensions between black men and women—while framing women as being simple “victims” of black male sexuality; and (3) when emphasis is placed on both the lack of “outness” among DL men and the “heightened homophobia” within black communities, an image of black people as unreasonably backward and socially underdeveloped emerges—without giving recognition to racism’s effects in static constructions of blackness. Because of this lack of recognition, this chapter engages more than just discourse, enabling a “critical pedagogy,” which, as Douglas Kellner explains in Media Culture,

develops concepts and analyses that will enable readers to critically dissect the artifacts of contemporary media and consumer culture, help them to unfold the meanings and effects on their culture, and thus give individuals power over their cultural environment. (1995, 10)

As I have engaged questions around DL men and their performances of sexuality, one of the most problematic tendencies among consumers and producers of discourse has been the lack of scrutiny given to source material, as well as the case studies used within quasi-documentary narratives. This chapter rereads the discourse in a historical context, understanding how, as Patricia Hill Collins puts it, “the past is ever present. . . . [T]he new racism relies heavily on the manipulation of the ideas within mass media” (2004, 54). Rather than seeing the construction of the DL as an extension of black male criminalization, much more attention has been given to the intent, ethics, and behaviors of the DL subject. As one woman told me, “I wish these men would just come from down low, put it out in front and on the table!” Her imperative echoes the sentiments of many women and men who embrace circulating narratives of DL men as irresponsibly parading as straight, while infecting “our sisters” with HIV/AIDS—often left to assume that the motive behind these men’s secrecy is simple deception, without accounting for the sociopolitical circumstances of men of color, more generally.

Such conclusions are too simple, leading to reductive renderings of black male sexuality, as well as of the complexities of HIV/AIDS transmission. Because DL men typically remain “down low” or choose discretion in terms of their (homo)sexual behavior, there is little opportunity to hear actual explanations for discreet sexual practices by DL men themselves. For this reason, the voice of the subject is often absent, leaving the general public to absorb information that reflects more about those who do the reporting, as well as their own anxieties around issues of sexual uncertainty, more than actually representing the population of men on the DL. Specifically, the construction of “disease might be read as a literalizing or making manifest of the social atrocities against those afflicted . . . here, gays, the urban poor, women of color . . .” (Browning 1998, 23).

In this sense, the dominant reading of the down low is an interpretation of absence. DL discourse attempts to give textuality to an inaccessible/ invisible presence that is void of cultural recognition. This, in turn, produces more negative attitudes toward black men, facilitating intra-margin tensions, whereby “brothas” are always scrutinized and policed. As black women search for the “signs” of DL men—often finding nothing—they collect misleading data on DL men. I argue that this desire for any information, as well as the robust dissemination of “knowledge,” has led many to embrace and perpetually recycle incomplete narratives, which purport to provide greater clarity and valuable answers to those concerned with the “deadly” and “dangerous” deceivers. Through close readings of popular media texts and their constructions of the DL subject, I uncover the somewhat coded meanings that are inscribed within DL discourse. First, through an examination of the shift in DL men’s construction from “homo-thug” to “down low,” I map and trace the residue of the “thug” representation, which, I argue, is never detachable from its most recent manifestations in popular mediums. Second, I look closely at the emergence of a physical representation of the down low, through J. L. King, who provides a visual image and affirms highly scrupulous explanations for the presence and “prevalence” of DL men. Since the beginning of the down-low media frenzy, King has been a central figure in its momentum. As a self-proclaimed “DL brotha,” he “outed” the culture, and himself, to the public. Here, I am really interested in how black popular discourse makes use of and relies on what I call a “messenger mythology” as a mode of understanding King and his “knowledge” of community health issues. Third, I reevaluate the popular ethos of “Save our women,” which has become the central explanation for discussion around the “dreadful bisexual.” Finally, I offer some examples of HIV/AIDS outreach in communities of color, as well as pose a challenge for cultural constructions of “queers of color” in terms of disease. Most important, I argue that these contemporary portrayals of DL men recall historic laments of black men as poor fathers, always acting out, and leading to the dysfunction of black society. Similar to various representations of black women—where they are framed as the central problem within black families⁸—a new working-class “monster”⁹ has now invaded black familial territory, endangering all that has been gained post–civil rights: DL men.

From the “Homo-Thug” to “Down Low”: Constructing Black Sexual Deviance

The negro is eclipsed. He is made into a member. He is the penis.

—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

To be an American Negro male is to be a kind of walking phallic symbol; which means that one pays, in one’s own personality, for the sexual insecurity of others.

—James Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy”

As black men who have sex with other men while sometimes maintaining relations with black women have received much public attention, their moniker “down low” (...