How can I be down? A bisexual black man's take on "the down low.".

In a conversation about the "down low," a white co-worker and intermittent sex partner of mine told me, "Well, what needs to be said first is that these men are bisexual. They just need to have the space to come out." I told her I thought that assertion was rather presumptive, and she bristled.

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As a black bisexual who happens to be non-monogamous, I can assert that the notion that black men on the "DL" are categorically bi is a gross oversimplification of the issue, and it shows little understanding for the way black men navigate their sexuality and identity. Much of what has been written about the down low has been typically racist in its dialogue around black male sexuality, though it has traded in a white female victim for a black one.

Though I continued discussions around the subject with both white and non-white people, I came to the conclusion that there were few who really wanted to speak honestly about the DL. So, over the last few years, I've joked with more than a few people that I was going to start a trading card set made up of out, bisexual, non-monogamous, black men. After all, there were only 15 of us on the planet, and I thought we should be able to keep track of each other. Later, I realized my joking was a way of coping with my frustration and anger. Those feelings are rooted in the pathologizing (and often racist and/or erotophobic) nature of the discussions about folks like me by so many outside of queer communities and in our indictment from within those communities as well (black + nonmonogamous + bisexual = DL = vector for disease).

While gay and straight white academic communities and the popular media continued to engage in rote, inflammatory, sensational and racist demonizing of black sexuality, the black community, gay and straight, has not been able to get a handle on the discussion either. This failure was largely due to the dynamic overlap of homophobia and class privilege that has stunted most discussions of the way unchallenged patriarchy and sexism are integral to the experience of those on the DL and those they may infect.

As I've gotten older and more experienced, it has become clearer to me that many of the men I had encountered in the black community, who were either suspected of being homosexual or had confided in me that they did indeed have sex with men, would have been exclusively involved with men had they had a supportive community. More often than not, though, they were engaged in sexual relationships with black women because doing so was what made them black men, what made them good men, according to the community they did have. That a community all too invested in creating "Million Man Marching Great Black Fathers" and in making "Straight Black Dick" the measuring stick--the barometer of verity, the only thing of real intrinsic worth--is also a community willing to have women die at the end of one should come as no surprise. Still, the notions that the "crisis" is something new, and worse, a phenomenon specific to the machinations of an encroaching black homo menace, persist within the black community and beyond, while the relationship to rates of poverty and imprisonment go unmentioned. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has pointed out in the The Village Voice, the figure of one-third of black bisexual men being HIV positive came from research in night clubs in six cities and hardly constitutes the solid connection between the DL and HIV rates among women.

Last year on a listserv of black academics and artists, I found myself in ...