Dr. Jeffrey McCune

Yeah.

To a so-called DL character.

And for me, that does two things.

It allows us to be distracted from the ways in which we can really save Black women's lives.

We know that a very small percentage of men are DL men who actually have sex with women, right?

And so that's one piece that we knew then, and we still know that today.

But the other piece that we know is intravenous drug use.

was also at its increase, and that also created transmission in different ways.

So I think we got hoodwinked, if you will, by this whole kind of conversation that Oprah was having and lost kind of focus on the health and wellness of the whole Black community.

What I think we have today, right, we've got lost in this kind of commercialized version of the DL.

And the only way we do that is through these kind of salacious narratives, right?

I know this man.

He was married to, you know, this famous beauty queen.

And then he got with this famous producer-director man.

And, oh, my God, I got to tell this story.

I need to expose him.

And so it becomes almost like a community criminal.

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

DL in the sense that we were discreet because we didn't want anybody

to do harm to our bodies, to kind of provoke us in the church, to provoke us in our community.