The "DL" Myth and the Damage It's Causing


When the whole "DL" myth exploded on the scene in the aftermath of J.L. King's book, something about the whole thing evoked skepticism in me. Mr. King made the rounds on Oprah and other talk shows, and the "DL" phenomenon was featured in numerous newspaper and magazine stories, including in Essence magazine something like 6 months in a row...Something about the whole thing just never sat right with me. It just seemed too overblown and like just another attempt to further stereotype black men. It's almost like it was the "close out" stereotype.....When more violent, less intelligent, lazy, underemployed, unemployed, unable to speak properly, irresponsible, not-taking-care-of-kids, not in jail/on probation/on parole, not diseased, not on drugs all fail......just throw "must be gay then" on top of it all and it makes every black male suspect in some way. It made the possibility of a good, responsible black man a total myth...that every brother had to have "something" wrong with him.....So when everyone was on the bandwagon, I felt that something about the whole thing was just insidiously racist.....Like Black men were the only ones doing this.....I couldn't believe that they were really doing it in numbers far in excess of others...the whole stereotype seemed harmful but I couldn't figure out how.


Now research has shown just how destructive and inaccurate this is. How the DL phenomenon is really rooted in myth, and how mistaken assumptions about black sexuality are finding their way into scientific research on the spread of HIV, and this could do more to fuel risky behavior than prevent it. Authors of a new commentary published in Annals of Epidemiology looked closely at the issue.


Reports on African-American men who identify themselves as straight but secretly have sex with men -- dubbed the "down low" lifestyle -- first appeared when men who said they were part of this subculture wrote books about it and the media picked up the story, Dr. Chandra L. Ford of Columbia University in New York City, the commentary's lead author, told Reuters Health.


"Part of what has happened as a result of that initial burst of stories reporting the 'down low' is that those stories often tied the down low to high rates of HIV infection among African-American women, which was not supported by epidemiological data," Ford added. "There were a lot of assumptions, there were a lot of leaps of faith that led to that."


Despite the non-scientific source, epidemiologists began doing research based on the idea that Black Men living the down low lifestyle were driving the spread of HIV, she and her colleagues note in their article in the Annals of Epidemiology.


This assumption was mistaken in many ways, they explain. First of all, the practice of straight men secretly having sex with men is seen across all ethnic groups. Also, Ford notes, while Black Men and women have higher rates of HIV infection than other ethnic groups, they also report fewer risk behaviors, suggesting researchers should look elsewhere to understand the disparity. For example, she adds, having a bacterial sexually transmitted infection can increase the risk of both transmitting and contracting HIV, and it is possible such infections may be more common among Blacks than whites due to poorer access to health care.


Research has refuted the claim that Black Men living the down low lifestyle are driving the spread of HIV, Ford said, but the perception that this is the case remains, even in the epidemiology community. She points to a dean at a colleague's school who urged researchers to study "the down low" after seeing a TV segment on it.


The view of black sexuality as deviant and diseased has deep roots, Ford noted, pointing to the way the public and the medical community viewed syphilis in the early 20th century as a disease of the Black Community. Not only could perceptions of the down low drive the men actually pursuing such a lifestyle further underground, making them less likely to get care, said Ford, it also draws attention away from interventions that could be truly effective, such as routine HIV testing of all adults. "HIV- AIDS is a social disease, so that means that there are social phenomena that influence the spread of the disease," Ford said. "We have to be as rigorous about understanding the social phenomena as we would be if we were studying how a microbe influences disease progression."


It shows the impact of stereotypes and negative views of black life in America that people, including a far too many women of color, were willing to scapegoat black men and their alleged deviant behavior as the root of the HIV crisis without looking at whether or not scientific research even backed up the claims. Hopefully more studies come along that paint a more realistic picture of what's going on than the one painted by one author with some books to sell.

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