Dr. Jeffrey McCune

And so it becomes almost like a community criminal, right?

But the reality is that most Black gay men, one point in our lives, we were DL.

Thank you for having us.

Yeah.

It's so important to identify the down low as a vernacular term used within Black communities to describe things that we did very discreetly, right?

Yes.

And then it moved into sexual discreet, right?

And so I got this girl number on the down low.

I got this dude's number on the down low.

This notion of the down low was really current

within Black communities, and then in the late 90s, early 2000s, moved into a kind of popular cultural term, right?

But I like to say that it's really important to think about the download even further than the 1980s and 90s, like the Underground Railroad, right, was a download activity to keep us out of the harm of surveillance.

And so the politics of the DL, for me,

historic, right?

It's a way to keep out of the lines of harm and also surveillance.

Yeah.

It makes entire sense.

It makes a lot of sense.

And I really want to like hone in on the kind of way in which the rising rates of HIV amongst Black women worked in tandem with the kind of what I call the pop version of the DL, right?

the DL becomes used as a ploy to get us to move our attention away from so-called sexual behavior, sexual health, sexual wellness, right?