Dear Editor,
“And that is what Sherman Carcamo says it will be – a restaurant. This afternoon he gave 7NEWS a tour of the Down Low and showed us that it is designed like a restaurant – and it will be a restaurant. – – ‘It is a restaurant and I am planning to accommodate a little bit to tourists and to the locals and it is not designed as a disco or nightclub.’”
(Keith Swift – Channel Seven News, 22/12/06)
Name – “a mark or sign standing out; a word by which a person, place or thing is distinctively known.” A name does not merely identify; it expresses the essential nature of its bearer.
In August 2003 Benoit Denizet-Lewis published an article entitled – Double Lives on the Down Low. The following is quoted from that article.
“In its upper stories, the Flex bathhouse in Cleveland feels like a squash club for backslapping businessmen. There’s a large gym with free weights and exercise machines on the third floor. In the common area, on the main floor, men in towels lounge on couches and watch CNN on big-screen TV’s.
“In the basement, the mood is different: the TV’s are tuned to porn, and the dimly lighted hallways buzz with sexual energy. A naked black man reclines on a sling in a room called “the dungeon play area.’’ Along a hallway lined with lockers, black men eye each other as they walk by in towels.
“There are two bathhouses in Cleveland. On the city’s predominantly white West Side, Club Cleveland — which opened in 1965 and recently settled into a modern 15,000-square-foot space — attracts many white and openly gay men. Flex is on the East Side, and it serves a mostly black and Hispanic clientele, many of whom don’t consider themselves gay.
“I go to Flex one night to meet Ricardo Wallace, an African-American outreach worker for the AIDS Task Force of Cleveland who comes here twice a month to test men for H.I.V. Twenty years ago, Wallace came here for fun. He was 22 then, and AIDS seemed to kill only gay white men in San Francisco and New York.
“Today, while there are black men who are openly gay, it seems that the majority of those having sex with men still lead secret lives, products of a black culture that deems masculinity and fatherhood as a black man’s primary responsibility — and homosexuality as a white man’s perversion.
“Wallace ticks off the grim statistics: blacks make up only 12 percent of the population in America, but they account for half of all new reported H.I.V. infections. While intravenous drug use is a large part of the problem, experts say that the leading cause of H.I.V. in black men is homosexual sex (some of which takes place in prison, where blacks disproportionately outnumber whites). According to the Centers for Disease Control, one-third of young urban black men who have sex with men in this country are H.I.V.-positive, and 90 percent of those are unaware of their infection.
“Rejecting a gay culture they perceive as white and effeminate, many black men have settled on a new identity, with its own vocabulary and customs and its own name: Down Low. There have always been men — black and white — who have had secret sexual lives with men. But the creation of an organized, underground subculture largely made up of black men who otherwise live straight lives is a phenomenon of the last decade.
“Many of the men at Flex – – – and many of the black men I met these past months in Cleveland, Atlanta, Florida, New York and Boston – – are on the Down Low, or on the DL, as they more often call it. Most date or marry women and engage sexually with men they meet only in anonymous settings like bathhouses and parks or through the Internet. Most DL men identify themselves not as gay or bisexual but first and foremost as black. To them, as to many blacks, that equates to being inherently masculine.”
In April 2004the following press release was issued in Chicago, IL – OPRAH GETS THE LOWDOWN ON THE DOWN LOW — This Friday, following up on a New York Times Magazine cover story, Oprah learns about a lifestyle called living on the “down low,” the secret sex life of “straight” men who have sex with other men, all the while deceiving their wives and girlfriends. This revealing look into an underground sex world exposes the possible connection to the alarming rise in AIDS cases among women. One man, J.L. King, goes public with a tell-all book, On The Down Low: A Journey Into The Lives Of Straight Black Men Who Sleep With Men. When Oprah asks King how he knows who lives on the “down low,” he surprises the audience with his response, “We do it by the eyes…I could make a connection in this room.” The Oprah Winfrey Show aired Friday, April 16, 2004
In Your Guide to HIV / AIDS, Mark Cichocki wrote the following: “More and more we are beginning to hear the term “men on the down low”. What does it mean and why is it important to understand – – – ? The most generic definition of the term down low, or DL, is ‘to keep something private,’ whether that refers to information or activity. Although the term originated in the African American community, the behaviors associated with the term are not new and not specific to black men who have sex with men.
“The practice of bisexual men on the ‘down low’ having unprotected sex with their female as well as their male partners is partially to blame for the rise in heterosexual transmission of HIV, especially in minority women and women of color.- – – this trend is certain to continue. While there has been no data to confirm HIV risk behavior associated with these men, what is clear is that women, men, and children of minority races and ethnicities are, disproportionately affected by HIV and AIDS – – – Being on the ‘down low’ makes that much more difficult.”
Belizeans, because a name does not merely identify but expresses the essential nature of its bearer, Is the name Down Low Restaurant – a coincidence or a deliberate choice?
Henry G. Gordon