Brokeback down-low

Gary Younge of the Grauniad makes a very interesting point about black and white American perceptions of married men who have sex with other men behind their wives' backs. For one group, bisexuality is an individual character flaw or characteristic, for the other it is a public health crisis.

What was Brokeback Mountain but a brilliant film about two men on the
down-low set to glorious music and enchanting scenery? "It's pretty clear that
if they had been two black men it would have been a different reaction," says
Keith Boykin, the author of Beyond the Down Low. "It would have been an evil,
nefarious story about deception and disease. These are guys who blatantly cheat
on their wives with other men. There's no way it would have been called a love
story if they were black."

Left there, the down-low would be just one more attempt to pathologise black male sexuality - a titillating riff on the long-held myth of the untamed bestial urges that increase with the melanin count. But the down-low is different. It has gained legitimacy and traction in
the African-American community because of the dramatic rise in HIV among
African-American women. In 2003 the rate of Aids diagnoses for black women was
25 times that of white women, according to the US government's Centres for
Disease Control; between 2001 and 2004 black women accounted for 68% of new HIV
infections. HIV/Aids is now the number-one killer of black women aged between 25
and 34. The leading cause of infection, says the CDC, is heterosexual contact.
Meanwhile other CDC studies reveal that a "significant number" of black men who
sleep with men still "identify themselves as heterosexual".