Brittany Luce

Why did that distinction of having sex with men but not being gay, why did that matter to people?

Which was proven to be a large misconception.

It's not true that DL men were responsible for the high HIV rates in Black women.

And if you want to know more about that, you can actually check out an episode we just did about safer sex.

But back to this Oprah episode.

This came out in 2004, and I started college at HBCU in Washington, D.C.

in 2005.

Truly, that framing...

from that one episode of Oprah and the way that it started a million barbershop and beauty salon conversations, you know, being a young black woman and HBCU in Washington, DC, where at that time the HIV transmission rates were of the highest in the country.

And there was especially concerned about the diagnosis rates and transmission rates for black women who had sex with men.

And so, you know, at that time I could tell that among my classmates and the girls in my dorm, there was a lot of panic, not so much about the actual, perhaps unprotected sex that they were having with the guys in their life, but more so about like the imagined

unprotected sex that other men were having with other men who might have been only one or two degrees separated from them.

Does that make sense?

So when people are talking about, even just a cursory search of social media, you will see white people talking about DL this and DL that, which to me feels like a big shift.

But when people are talking about a DL man today, what do you think they're describing?

I'm glad you're bringing this up.

It makes me think of something I saw recently on social media, which is this viral content creator called the DL Whisperer.

Part of his whole thing is teaching straight women how to identify DL men, which is – that's his own thing.

And then on top of that, though, to your point, Kai, he also has a lot of anti-trans rhetoric.

And very recently –