The closer a secret is kept, the more powerful the impact once it is finally revealed.
Such is the case with author and activist J.L. King’s intriguing look at the lives and lifestyles of black men who sleep with other men but do not consider themselves to be gay. These men live “on the down low,” the “DL” for short, and their sexual activities have gained significant notice as the rate of HIV/AIDS infection in black women has skyrocketed, with the vast majority of cases coming from heterosexual sex.
King is a veteran of the DL himself and his book serves partly as a social and psychological survey of the other men he has surveyed and partly as highly candid memoir.
King was well regarded in his community, popular at his church, successful in his career, and married to a woman who had no idea that his secret life existed. But when she caught him in a lie and with another man, the marriage collapsed and King’s long and painful path to self-awareness began.
King cites the negative image many socially conservative black men have of homosexuality as an obstacle to those men being honest with their partners and themselves about who they are.
Among the more intriguing elements of On the Down Low are the peculiar approaches men on the DL have to the sexual act, seeking a strictly physical sexual relationship with their secret male partners while remaining in more traditional arrangements with women.
Whether this discrepancy is a product of scrupulously guarded secrecy and shame or the natural preference of an understudied sexual identity is one of the numerous questions raised by this book.
Though the infection statistics make the DL a huge public health issue, King is neither a sociologist nor a medical professional. And while a more clinical look at this issue would be welcome, King accomplished what he set out to do:
provide light and insight into a world that so many have worked so hard to keep in the shadows. —John Moe
Trying to put aside my bias and low opinion of obama, I ask myself how a man whose life story cannot be documented can become President of the United States in record time. His life is one secret after another. He was elected because his only "accomplishment" is a dark skin color.
The implication is that he and his ancestors have the same history as most of the African Americans today.
That simply is not true. His Mama was a white woman and his father was African. Not African American, but African. Was his father ever refused a place in a whites only section of a restaurant? Did his father grow up having to sit in the back of the bus? Was his father threatened with lynching for sleeping with and impregnating a white teenage girl?
Obama lived a sheltered life in Hawaii and had more opportunities handed to him than most people, black or white. How has he suffered because f the color of his skin? What doors were closed because he was black?
Blacks who see his election as an historical benchmark are looking through smoke and mirrors. The reality is that they helped elect a man who used them by making him think he was one of them.
Deep thinking over for the night :-)