Chapter 1: What does 'men on the down low' mean in cultural context?
This message comes from the Science of Happiness. Science shows that love is expansive. Academy Award winner Gina Davis explores why people love, how love grows, and how it sustains them. Subscribe to the Science of Happiness wherever you get your podcasts. This was never about the health of Black women.
This was about creating a boogeyman, which is the hyper-sexualized, dangerous Black man who walks around horny and just destroying everything with his lust.
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.
Allow me to take you back for a second to the daytime TV of yesteryear. The year is 2004. I remember sitting in my living room, well, my parents' living room, watching Oprah with my mom. And there was this conversation about DL men. That's men on the down low, meaning that they are discreet or secretive about having sex with other men.
Not even let's have any kind of relationship beyond sex? If I was gay, yes. But when you're on a DL, all you want to do is have sex. It's about gratification, not orientation.
That was 2004, but now it's 2026. And if you open up TikTok right now, you'll hear the same thing.
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Chapter 2: How has the term 'down low' evolved over time?
Okay, so how to tell if your man is DL. So this is something important for us to talk about.
The DL man is a recurring character in Black culture. Someone who comes up in messy story times as a cautionary tale or even as a reason to explain away bad behavior from straight men. If he beats on women, I promise you he's DL. So I'm trying to understand, what is it about our culture, and maybe this moment specifically, that has us so obsessed with the dealings of DL men?
Specifically at a time when people are being surveilled and scrutinized for their sexual behavior. To find out, I'm joined by Dr. Jeffrey McCune, author of Sexual Discretion, Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing.
Thank you for having us.
And Kai Wright, a journalist and host for The Guardian, who has been writing about sexual politics for the last 30 years.
Thank you, Brittany.
I am so happy to have you both. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. Today, we're going to talk about men on the down low. So who are the first people using this term on the down low, and what kind of person were they describing?
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?
Hello. Yes. Like if you're getting information you weren't supposed to have, maybe if someone were to buy books. boosted goods, let's say. On the low. On the DL, exactly.
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Chapter 3: What are the misconceptions surrounding DL men and HIV rates?
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. We didn't want anybody to actually bash us. So the safest way to be was discreet, right?
And so the notion that so many Black gay men now are like online trying to expose DL men, I always ask, Go back 30 years with yourself or 20 years with yourself. Would you have wanted somebody to expose your development into sexuality?
And I look at the discourse today online around DL, folks. What I find notable is how adjacent it is to anti-trans discourse. Oh, say more about that. That you see them side by side. We are obsessed in this culture with false binaries. and particularly with false binaries around race, gender, and sexuality.
You have to stay inside whatever box we have decided exists for that category because those boxes exist in order to create a caste system. And anybody whose existence challenges the boundaries of those boxes becomes an outcast in society. People start coming for them.
And people whose sexual behavior and sexual identity don't match challenged the idea of, like, there's straight people and there's gay people, and here's how they get ranked in society. And I don't think it is coincidental when you think of it that way that right now you would see this surge. in conversation about DL men when we are in a moment of retrenchment around caste in the United States.
That is what this moment politically and culturally is about. The Trump movement is about, can we put everybody back in the boxes in which they belong so that we can rank them and say who's on top and who's on bottom? And so in that culture, in that moment, lo and behold, here comes the DL monster again as this weird thing that doesn't stay where it's supposed to stay.
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 –
He expressed a desire to physically fight T.S. Madison. For those who don't know, T.S. Madison is, I mean, she's a diva of all trades, but most prominently, she does a lot of like hosting, podcasting work, television. She's acted. Many people might remember her as being featured prominently on Beyonce's Renaissance album.
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Chapter 4: How does the media influence perceptions of DL men?
Across the internet, right? It's profitable, right? But for me, I'm really trying to, you know, understand what are the motivations for people who want to kind of create new Black criminals. Because I'm not one of them. I'm not interested in creating some new Black criminals. We got enough folks, you know. New Black criminals.
Coming up, but somehow the DL codes for a certain kind of truculent masculinity, a kind of like, dare I say, thug masculinity or lay it down masculinity that people are as much as they are repelling this, they are attracted to it. Stay with us.
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You know, these days, the term DL is sort of used as a catch-all term to define people of all backgrounds who are closeted in some way. But why is race important when it comes to talking about who or what a DL man is?
With these terms, they do start to lose meaning over time. And so, like, if you go on the apps... There are men of all kinds of walks of life there calling themselves DL, including very openly gay men, you know, who are like, today I'm DL, you know. Tomorrow, who knows? Tomorrow, who knows?
And that I kind of, I love, you know, like to be honest, like, you know, like everybody try on what you need to try on today. That's great.
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