Sometime back I think I'd posted a long article in the New York Times
that described life on the "down low" - a world of secret homosexual
encounters that many black men in the US are engaging in, because of
the very particular homophobia that black men face, both from their
own community and others around. Its a depressing read, not least
because of the many obvious parallels with much homosexual life in
India, but all the more worth reading for that. Here's another good
article on that subject from Salon.com
Vikram
Down low blues
All I want is a boyfriend. But as a black gay man, I keep hooking up
with men who not only shun commitment -- they don't even want to come
out of the closet.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Adam Phillips
Aug. 12, 2004 | I met Rick on a Thursday night at a club called
Vapor. He was somewhere below average height and stood against the
walls, away from the light. Even in the dark his brown skin glowed.
All the men at Vapor were dressed similarly: long shirt, baggy pants,
jewelry, scowl. Rick had on a Chicago Bears jersey that he seemed too
old and too serious for. Ditto for the thick gold chain that he had
the good sense to keep inside the jersey. But he wore them the same
way he held his plastic cup of ice and liquor: with an attitude.
I could feel his slow eyes on my back. I knew that eye contact
between us would collapse into a staring contest. He was very sexy,
hiding in the dark. He looked guilty, scared of getting caught, but
kind of turned on to be doing something he obviously thought was bad.
It's worth noting that Vapor's black gay night was called "Taboo,"
where most white bars used campy names like "Paradise," "Oasis"
and "Heaven." You had to pass through a sort of ectoplasm of shame to
enter Taboo. And "gay" night is what I call it. The management, if
they called it anything, used the word "alternative," as though upon
entering you might find Bjork or a Foo Fighter. "Alternative" was the
safe word bouncers used to make sure the seemingly straight people
had come to the right place.
After over an hour of staring and several rounds of the slow motion
nod that confirms attraction, Rick finally came over and spoke to me.
He had a smooth, husky rasp and a gentlemanly approach to
conversation. He said he had just moved to our northeastern city from
Chicago. I told him that I'd just moved from New York. He was a
salesman, and he'd just finished with some clients.
"Dressed like that?"
He said he had the jersey in his car and often changed clothes out of
the trunk. "I travel a lot," he said. "Why did you move here? Work?"
I told him yes, and I kept talking because he kept listening. When he
spoke, there was sex in his voice and sex in his eyes, and I tried to
put some in my voice and eyes. He asked if he could drive me home,
and I said yes.
So we got in his very clean car, and he drove. He told me he was on
the low, or the DL -- which is short for "down low," but could just
as easily mean "dumb lie" or "devoid of love." A lot of men on the DL
just want sex with men, and will usually commit only to a woman --
and they'll never acknowledge what they do as gay behavior. It's a
game, like that staring contest, that's hot because they have this
idea that it's, well, taboo.
Before Rick, there were Omar, Kyle, Andrew, Nate, John, Jon, and
Johnny. They all found it hard to see me as more than a hard dick and
a firm ass. Or both. We'd move the child's seat to fumble in the back
of the car; we'd do it in the lobby of their friend's apartment; we'd
fuck in the last car of the train at three o'clock in the morning.
Afterwards I'd always climb into my own bed wondering why I was
sleeping alone, while they went home to their wives and girlfriends.
Why hadn't anybody told me that being comfortably gay could feel
lonelier than life in the closet?
Rick was the first intelligent, educated adult who had interested me
in months. I went to a predominately white Ivy League school, and so
accordingly most of my friends are white. My good friends of color
are all women. If black America is lamenting the dearth of educated
black men, then educated black men who are gay and OK with it seem
like an endangered species.
Black men tend to see me, though, where men of other races simply
don't. I've noticed a strange sort of racism in the gay community
that tends to render black men invisible. Maybe it's the paranoid,
stigmatizing reporting on black men and AIDS; maybe it's something as
dumb but insidious as the lack of black models in the Abercrombie &
Fitch ad campaign. Who knows; maybe it's that I just don't do it for
a sizable portion of the white community. (I've been on more than one
date that's begun or ended with "Sorry, I'm just not into black
guys"; the ones who say they're into black guys are actually just
into black cocks.)
Black men have different hang-ups. They tend to think I sound white,
which, to them, makes me seem like a Republican, which really isn't a
turn-off; it's just exotic. But after I tell them I have a media job,
men on the DL are leery that I'll out them, so I learned to make
something up -- "I'm a graphic designer," "I'm a lawyer," "I coach
middle school girl's soccer" -- in the same way that with some men,
in certain contexts, I'll alter the way I speak so I sound less ...
Republican.
Steve, a news producer from Nebraska that I'd slept with at a black
journalists conference, told me he was happy living on the DL. He was
a good husband who made good money that kept his wife oblivious. He
told me he "earned the right to spend the night" me, and that he
looked forward to spending the next night with me, too.
"What about the day?" I felt stupid for asking.
"If I'm free, we can do it in the afternoon, sure."
He didn't know what I was asking and he never called me. I watched
him dance with some women at a party. I watched him disappear with
two men in the elevator. I ran into him on my way out of the hotel,
and he said, "See you next time!"
I tried to be casual about it, but it didn't work. "You're an
asshole," I said, and climbed into the airport shuttle. On the way to
my flight, I thought about Googling him and calling his wife. I tried
letting it all go, but I felt like the pathetic refuse DL men leave
behind.
------------
Anyway, as I was saying: Rick drove the car, and I was sad: I'd seen
something that dampened my enthusiasm.
"Can I ask you what that ring is?" I asked.
"Man, you don't miss anything, do you?" After a long pause, he
said, "I'm with somebody."
I imagined his wife and their adorable children waiting for him back
in suburbia and let out a long sigh.
"I'm with a guy," he said.
Well, this was unprecedented. He was on the DL, in the closet and
contemplating cheating on his boyfriend? Earlier that night Rick
mentioned that he could easily have gone to a straight bar to pick up
a woman, and had regularly contemplated being with one. Still, even
though his steady partner wasn't a woman, and he liked sex with men,
he was adamant that the world outside his bedroom see him as a
practicing heterosexual.
"I live here, and he lives somewhere else, and sometimes I get lonely
and need to feel wanted and attractive," he said. "Right now, I feel
that with you. Is that a problem for you?"
"Well, I like you. So, yeah, that's a problem for me. But I'm lonely,
too. And I want to feel wanted."
"So what are we doing?"
"We're talking about how much life totally sucks."
I've been in this moment with lots of men, the moment where you
realize you're the milk he had to pick up on the way home or the
crazy thing he did on that business trip in Miami. Because even if he
had to confess, I'd be the other woman. I'd have to be Pam, the girl
he used to work with, or Skittles, some out-of-control stripper he
met at So-and-So's bachelor party.
He pulled up in front of my house and we sat in the car. He asked me
to touch him, and I did. I asked him to come up, and he declined.
Every few months he'd drive to my house just to open up the passenger
door and let me sit beside him so he could look at me and tell me
that he felt safe with me and that I looked 17. We never did more
than that.
For a year he kept driving by. And it's hard to say why he did, and
why I kept getting in, but the best explanation is possibility -- the
unspoken promise that things might change. Rick was close to 40, and
occasionally he could see all the little compartments he'd made of
his life. Occasionally, he'd call them ridiculous. He wanted the
connective tissue between his family, his friends and his work to be
more than secrecy.
I seemed ideal for that. He'd never met anybody like me, he'd say. I
was intense and funny and appeared to want only him and not his
money. When he asked how I'd managed to stay single for so long,
rather than tell him that I'd never found a black man I could
actually be with, I said I was waiting for him. He was more flattered
than freaked out. I think he wanted to make me a piece of ass, and I
think I liked changing his mind. I'd wanted a serious boyfriend for
over a year; I guess I kept coming down the stairs all those months
and riding shotgun to nowhere because I wanted to know whether he'd
ever give me what I knew I deserved.
Sometimes I'd ask what things would be like if he were single. He
never knew. Well, he knew he could never be outside with me. And he'd
have to sneak me into his apartment. And I could never meet his
family or go to his Christmas party at work. In turn, he wouldn't
want to come to my parents' for Thanksgiving. Were movies out of the
question? (We never went to one.) I imagined him choosing to sit a
seat away. Was his actual boyfriend down with that, too? ("Boyfriend"
was a word he never used; he didn't have a word for him. Everything
about the DL seems to be surreptitious and beyond language; to name
is to acknowledge and to communicate. There's a galaxy of
appellations that have nothing to do with mainstream homosexual
culture.) His sense of shame was robbing him of a normal gay life,
but everyone in his life thought he was straight -- including
himself, which was an achievement he didn't see the need to tamper
with.
Once, I told Rick I didn't want to see him anymore. Our being alone
together had devolved into our being together, yet alone. I finally
felt ridiculous about sitting parked in longing silence. He looked
hurt, but he didn't call for six months. When he did, it was with the
news that he was moving back to Chicago. I was at an airport in
another city and I wanted to turn around to be with him. What if he'd
changed?
We made a plan to see each other. I had never been more excited to
see a man. He loved Grace Jones; I'd made a CD with songs that we
would play while we did nothing in his car. He picked me up from the
train and we drove to his apartment. It was immaculate. He hadn't
started packing. We sat around and talked, and he asked me if I
wanted a drink. He made something with a lot of rum, and I gave him a
massage and he was affectionate. But the whole thing was just a more
intense version of what we did in the car. He wanted to "let go," but
he held on, mysteriously able to control his arousal.
After a couple of hours of tenacious resistance, the phone rang.
While he spoke, I massaged his shoulders, and he pushed me away. When
he was done, he started to dress. "You know who that was."
It was the boyfriend. And even though he lived two thousand miles
from us, he may as well have been on his way over from up the street.
He told me he had to take me home, and something fell inside me.
"Wait, I'm not sleeping here?"
"No, uh-uh. It's not like that, man. Get dressed."
And just like that, a fog had either descended upon him or lifted
from him. He'd started talking the way straight men do when another
man makes a pass. He was suddenly resolutely monogamous. He had this
skill of turning love to shame: I felt stupid and used. He drove me
home, and, later, I lay in bed hating myself but thankful I hadn't
told him I'd packed an overnight bag.
I replayed our last words to each other as I got out of his car.
Me: "I really feel like this could have been something. You know, if
things were different."
Him: "Yeah, it could be."
But it wasn't.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Adam Phillips is the pseudonym for a writer living in New England.
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