IS THE DOWN LOW REALLY LOW DOWN?

I was talking with my friend on the phone last night. She mentioned how black men were spreading AIDS in the community by being “bi-sexual.” But since she lived in the Bay Area, she more or less whispered it to me over the phone.

This took me back nine years to my Ethnic Studies graduate power point presentation. We had to address a problem in our community and focus on the resultant issues directly affecting the Black Community. My friend Anthony and I chose to do one on how homosexuality affected Black families. Predictably since we attended San Francisco State University, this was also received with a jaundice eye.

The point we were making with this presentation was that the foundation of the Black Community, the family, was under attack. See our idea of family, from an African perspective, which I believe is Nature’s perspective, is the "old fashioned" one of a male and a female procreating. Not some type of “artificial” conception be it in a test tube or insemination. My premise for this being “natural” is that nothing else in nature, except white Europeans, creates "artificial life" and presents this creation as a “universal” trait of man. Frankenstein was not black, yellow or brown.

Of course our presentation caught the attention of our Dean who happened to be “gay.” It appears it also made our African-centered professor upset because the dean was his friend and colleague. Needless to say, I would pay for that later.

The motivation for our choice has historical significance for the Black Community. Briefly, many Africans on the continent believe, in spite of European inspired protest, that homosexuality is NOT an African cultural tradition. However if one studies the history of the Scythians, Greeks, Romans, and other early European cultures, they find Europeans can’t make such claims. Put this in context with the many other cultural ideas that Europeans have presented to the world as “universal” ideas, I tend to believe the Africans.

With that said, we look at the contemporary events in the Black Community. We see that our prisons are crammed with young black men. We see that they are sexually assaulted as a sort of rights of passage by other black men who have been programmed to destroy things black. You see that economically, young black men are coerced into homosexuality because they have no idea of their ancestral spirit which could allow them to repeal this economic-psychological onslaught. You also see young black men in corporate white America accepting homosexuality as showing they are no threat to the white system. Finally, you see young black men going through an educational/social system that strips them of their Black cultural manhood, which in turn opens the door for all kinds of concepts.

As mentioned before, the above “pressures” on the Black man reaches into the very core of our cultural survival, the black family. For me, many of our cultural interactions with European culture are a form of imposed consensual cultural genocide, one that this society chooses to see as benign or non- threatening. Another reason is that the white community can take the homosexuality hit. They don’t need as many “male” bodies to protect their supremacy or foster their cultural legitimacy. They have their technology holding the hordes at bay. However Blacks are faced, on a global level, with high levels of imprisonment, economic depravation, disease, proportional drug addiction, historical ignorance, fear, and mistrust. Now we have an AIDS attack on our entire weakened community mobilized by one of our greatest drives, sex, supposedly the black man’s salvation.

So I ask, Is the Down Low really Low Down? I would say emphatically yes. I’ve never experienced sex with a man, but there must be something to it since it is so popular. But in my mind, that’s not what makes it “low down.” What makes it low down is that it has the potential to spreads AIDS to innocent people, wrecking havoc in our community. Even more realistically, it gives our women the disease, possibly passing it on to our children. Another mention is that the “down low” further exacerbates our communal problem because in many instances because of lack, it forces our women into homosexuality.

My final analysis is that if our young men want to lay with other men, leave our women alone. (Given the circumstances, I am sorry to say if our women can’t find a black man, try a man from another culture.) Gay black men don’t need to prove their lost “manhood” to anyone, if by consent, it’s gone. Finally, I wish our young men would stop raping other young men in prison. These are sicknesses that must be stopped if we are to get back to sanity. In fact, I wish my professors weren’t so hard on us nine years ago when the down low was further down.