Bolstered by national television exposure on Oprah and a cover story in the New York Times Magazine, the "down low"—a term used to refer to "straight" men who have sex with men—was thrust into the open in 2004. Keith Boykin, a former Clinton White House aide, goes beyond the hype with the first responsible, eye-opening look at the down low sensation. Unlike all previous accounts on the topic, Beyond the Down Low presents the DL not merely as a problem of gay and bisexual men living in the shadows, but more as an example of America's unwillingness to engage in critical but uncomfortable conversations about black sexuality. Boykin details how society has helped to create an environment where black gay and bisexual men feel compelled to lead double lives. Meanwhile, the dialogue that has taken place in the black community encourages an unhealthy battle of the sexes, ignores the complexity of the closet, demonizes bisexuality, disempowers women, and misdirects public resources and attention. This book is a timely and well researched answer to the question, "Why are so many black men on the DL?" More importantly, it is an essential tool to pry open the closet door in black America.
Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies, and Denial in Black America
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
In the past year, J.L. King's On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of "Straight" Black Men Who Sleep with Men, a New York Times Magazine piece and Oprah attention helped make a cultural phenomenon out of life "on the DL." Here, writer and activist Boykin (One More River to Cross) addresses what he sees as the implicitly racist and homophobic undertones of the media's coverage. He offers a point-by-point refutation of King's take on the DL - King's book, Boykin says, suffers from overgeneralizations, inconsistencies and distortions - and accuses King of serving up another "stereotypical image of black men as pathological liars, surreptitiously satisfying their primitive sexual cravings by cheating on their wives." But the heart of Boykin's argument is that the media, which often blame closeted black men for transmitting HIV to their female partners, are avoiding the opportunity to responsibly discuss the realities of sexuality, gender, race and AIDS. Boykin lucidly draws on science as well as personal experience in this important book. And while many of the cultural manifestations of black sexuality that Boykin documents here are fascinating - e.g., references to the DL (which Boykin defines as cheating on a partner regardless of one's sexuality) in popular music - the power of his book comes from his impassioned call to examine the real facts of sexual behavior and HIV transmission. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Keith Boykin is one of America's leading commentators on race and sexual orientation. He has appeared on CNN, Fox News, and NPR, and been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today, among many other publications. Boykin is currently a contestant in the Showtime reality show American Candidate, which airs nationally in Fall 2004. A graduate of Harvard Law School, the author served as special assistant to President Clinton on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues. Today Boykin is president of the National Black Justice Coalition, an organization established in 2003 to marshal African-American support for same-sex marriage rights. He is the author of One More River to Cross: Black and Gay in America and Respecting the Soul: Daily Reflections for Black Lesbians and Gays. He lives in New York City.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
32 of 35 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Black men historically were portrayed as sexual predators. Harper Lee's classic novel 'To kill a mockingbird' after all had a black man standing trial in a deep south courtroom for allegedly assaulting a white woman, also realizing that his fair trial was a long-shot. The father, Atticus Finch became a town pariah only for believing that his client deserved justice.
Yet, America likes to believe that we have moved beyond this and 'Willie Horton'. In our schools, mass media, and pop culture, we desperately want to believe that people are being treated fairly. This and the black community's historic memory of 'savagery/respectabilty' portrayals are not helping the intended audiences.
Keith Boykin clarifies that America is still hung up on the intersection of sex, sexuality, and ethnicity. He also argues the hang-up prevents black men and communities from having a needed dialogue about sexuality and civil rights. Black people who find themselves outside the heterosexual binary are being attacked by the dominant society, but also face resistance from within their own communities. Some black churches who easily grasp (and were in the forefront for) racial equality are silent on sexuality, or worse---promote hatred.
Boykin also takes on the recent inroads which white conservatives are making to black churches to downplay their past support for segregation. Because these same people have attacked and/or are attacking civil rights, Boykin is skeptical of their motives. He believes that the white conservatives are only trying to divide black communities and thus prevent real equality for all communities from being realized. Boykin argues that Black churches should not support movements which argue on behalf of discrimination.
Boykin's book is responding to an earlier work by another author, but this publication is soothing in tone. It wants people to understand that differences have always divided Americans. Such differentiation occurs ironically when the need for unity is especially pronounced. Silence and closed-minds prevent communities from overcoming discrimination in the present and working towards a better future for all.
Boykin's book is a provocative read for all people. For a challenging sex education get this title today!
Yet, America likes to believe that we have moved beyond this and 'Willie Horton'. In our schools, mass media, and pop culture, we desperately want to believe that people are being treated fairly. This and the black community's historic memory of 'savagery/respectabilty' portrayals are not helping the intended audiences.
Keith Boykin clarifies that America is still hung up on the intersection of sex, sexuality, and ethnicity. He also argues the hang-up prevents black men and communities from having a needed dialogue about sexuality and civil rights. Black people who find themselves outside the heterosexual binary are being attacked by the dominant society, but also face resistance from within their own communities. Some black churches who easily grasp (and were in the forefront for) racial equality are silent on sexuality, or worse---promote hatred.
Boykin also takes on the recent inroads which white conservatives are making to black churches to downplay their past support for segregation. Because these same people have attacked and/or are attacking civil rights, Boykin is skeptical of their motives. He believes that the white conservatives are only trying to divide black communities and thus prevent real equality for all communities from being realized. Boykin argues that Black churches should not support movements which argue on behalf of discrimination.
Boykin's book is responding to an earlier work by another author, but this publication is soothing in tone. It wants people to understand that differences have always divided Americans. Such differentiation occurs ironically when the need for unity is especially pronounced. Silence and closed-minds prevent communities from overcoming discrimination in the present and working towards a better future for all.
Boykin's book is a provocative read for all people. For a challenging sex education get this title today!
30 of 33 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
"Part of what concerned me [about King and the "Down Low" phenomenon being publicized in the media] was that the connection between the down low and black women seemed a bit illogical. There were two ways to look at it. Either the down low was new or the down low was old, but either way it did not make sense. If the down low was new in 2001, it could not have been responsible for an epidemic that was twenty years old. On the other hand, if the down low was old in 2001, then we should have been alarmed about HIV infection rates among black women ten to fifteen years earlier when the epidemic was raging out of control...
"The AIDS community of funders, researches, activists...had a problem...some activists [in the early 90's] decided to market the epidemic for Middle America... 'There was definitely an effort to make AIDS more compelling to the Black community' [Phil Wilson] recalled, 'and that process entailed a de-gaying of the epidemic'..."
Keith Boykin
BEYOND THE DOWN LOW
From Chapter Five
"When a Disease Becomes an Excuse"
"Governor McGreeley [of New Jersey]'s wife must have been going through a full range of emotions the day she stood next to her husband at his press conference...McGreeley also admitted to 'an adult consensual affair with another man' which he said 'violates my bonds of matrimony'. That was the real bombshell...dropped that day...By announcing his affair with another man, Governor McGreeley...proved that the down low is not just a black thing...We should have known that black men were not the only ones who cheated on their wives. Or had we bought into the myth of black male identity that constructs black manhood solely as pathology?"
Keith Boykin
BEYOND THE DOWN LOW
From Chapter Four,
"It's Not Just a Black Thing"
"I believe the recent trend toward demonizing those who are HIV positive for failure to disclose their HIV status sends the wrong signal. It stems from our need to blame other people for our own failures, and it is based in an unhelpful concept of victim-based morality that takes away our personal responsibility and assigns all the blame and puts all the responsibility on those who are HIV positive. Blaming someone else for our own actions will not change our actions, nor will it change the past. By the time you get to the point of blame, you have already passed the point of responsibility."
Keith Boykin
BEYOND THE DOWN LOW
From Chapter Twelve,
"Let's Talk About Sex"
Keith Boykin's heartfelt book BEYOND THE DOWN LOW: SEX, LIES AND DENIAL IN BLACK AMERICA is a scathing critique and passionate love letter to the Black community simultaneously. Simply put, Boykin analyses the structural hypocrisy, denial and irresponsibility that lie at the core of the African-American conversations about class, sex, sexuality, honest communication & true intimacy in relationships, racism and AIDS. It is his profoundly logical belief that these structural hypocrisies--concretized in Black culture by their deification in the fear-based, narcissistic linguistics of much of the Black church--combine with HIV to make any and all spreading of AIDS the seeming epidemic it has become in the Black community--not Black bisexual men in the closet (termed the "Down Low" community of brothers by J.L. King in his book).
Boykin's analyses of the myths in the Black community, those of the dominant culture, the gay subculture in both communities and the immature beliefs regarding honesty, communication and sexual responsibility of many Black women in relationships that Boykin reveals are made more astounding by four things:
1) his actual quoting of Center for Disease Control statistics on HIV and AIDS, the likes of which J.L. King purposely never quotes in his book (for reasons he describes that would have had him sued by King for libel by now if they weren't true)
2) His candid revealing of his life and mores as a gay man and his advocacy for the gay community
3) his blistering critique of both the character and motivation of J.L. King, on the basis of having spoken with him personally on several occasion, and
4) the powerful critique and detailed analysis of the book, ON THE DOWN LOW; a book that Boykin reveals was not actually written by J.L. King, but by a professional Hollywood ghost writer he hired with the express purpose of creating a hysterical media buzz around the topic.
The media hype on the subject of King's product was successfully achieved by this year (when King appeared on Oprah) for the benefit of (what else?) making money on the fears and emotional issues of Black women in particular and the latent racism of white people in general. Nothing sells better than sex...except fear. J.L. King used both to sell his product: ON THE DOWN LOW. Truly, Boykin in BEYOND THE DOWN LOW shows that the whole "On the Down Low" phenomenon has been brought to hysteric proportions in an amazingly short amount of time in the exact same way the Classicist scholar/Reactionary Republican Mary Lefkowitz' uneven, politically biased and scientifically inaccurate critique of Afrocentrism called NOT OUT OF AFRICA did: it combines a topic of emotion-producing complexity (for Lefkowitz: the crisis of integrity in academia and ancient cultural research; for J.L. King: bisexuality in 21st century America) with another simplistic application of the 19th century *Black Buck/crazy Nigga/Mandingo* myth in modern times.
J.L. King's book is still incendiary and important, because it reveals the closet bisexual phenomenon and its actual consequences to people in both the homosexual and heterosexual community (who didn't already know about it), when combined with deceit and HIV. In fact, the only thing that could put ON THE DOWN LOW in its proper context, for the good of the Black community and the world at large, is BEYOND THE DOWN LOW by Keith Boykin.
Read this soon; read it now.
"The AIDS community of funders, researches, activists...had a problem...some activists [in the early 90's] decided to market the epidemic for Middle America... 'There was definitely an effort to make AIDS more compelling to the Black community' [Phil Wilson] recalled, 'and that process entailed a de-gaying of the epidemic'..."
Keith Boykin
BEYOND THE DOWN LOW
From Chapter Five
"When a Disease Becomes an Excuse"
"Governor McGreeley [of New Jersey]'s wife must have been going through a full range of emotions the day she stood next to her husband at his press conference...McGreeley also admitted to 'an adult consensual affair with another man' which he said 'violates my bonds of matrimony'. That was the real bombshell...dropped that day...By announcing his affair with another man, Governor McGreeley...proved that the down low is not just a black thing...We should have known that black men were not the only ones who cheated on their wives. Or had we bought into the myth of black male identity that constructs black manhood solely as pathology?"
Keith Boykin
BEYOND THE DOWN LOW
From Chapter Four,
"It's Not Just a Black Thing"
"I believe the recent trend toward demonizing those who are HIV positive for failure to disclose their HIV status sends the wrong signal. It stems from our need to blame other people for our own failures, and it is based in an unhelpful concept of victim-based morality that takes away our personal responsibility and assigns all the blame and puts all the responsibility on those who are HIV positive. Blaming someone else for our own actions will not change our actions, nor will it change the past. By the time you get to the point of blame, you have already passed the point of responsibility."
Keith Boykin
BEYOND THE DOWN LOW
From Chapter Twelve,
"Let's Talk About Sex"
Keith Boykin's heartfelt book BEYOND THE DOWN LOW: SEX, LIES AND DENIAL IN BLACK AMERICA is a scathing critique and passionate love letter to the Black community simultaneously. Simply put, Boykin analyses the structural hypocrisy, denial and irresponsibility that lie at the core of the African-American conversations about class, sex, sexuality, honest communication & true intimacy in relationships, racism and AIDS. It is his profoundly logical belief that these structural hypocrisies--concretized in Black culture by their deification in the fear-based, narcissistic linguistics of much of the Black church--combine with HIV to make any and all spreading of AIDS the seeming epidemic it has become in the Black community--not Black bisexual men in the closet (termed the "Down Low" community of brothers by J.L. King in his book).
Boykin's analyses of the myths in the Black community, those of the dominant culture, the gay subculture in both communities and the immature beliefs regarding honesty, communication and sexual responsibility of many Black women in relationships that Boykin reveals are made more astounding by four things:
1) his actual quoting of Center for Disease Control statistics on HIV and AIDS, the likes of which J.L. King purposely never quotes in his book (for reasons he describes that would have had him sued by King for libel by now if they weren't true)
2) His candid revealing of his life and mores as a gay man and his advocacy for the gay community
3) his blistering critique of both the character and motivation of J.L. King, on the basis of having spoken with him personally on several occasion, and
4) the powerful critique and detailed analysis of the book, ON THE DOWN LOW; a book that Boykin reveals was not actually written by J.L. King, but by a professional Hollywood ghost writer he hired with the express purpose of creating a hysterical media buzz around the topic.
The media hype on the subject of King's product was successfully achieved by this year (when King appeared on Oprah) for the benefit of (what else?) making money on the fears and emotional issues of Black women in particular and the latent racism of white people in general. Nothing sells better than sex...except fear. J.L. King used both to sell his product: ON THE DOWN LOW. Truly, Boykin in BEYOND THE DOWN LOW shows that the whole "On the Down Low" phenomenon has been brought to hysteric proportions in an amazingly short amount of time in the exact same way the Classicist scholar/Reactionary Republican Mary Lefkowitz' uneven, politically biased and scientifically inaccurate critique of Afrocentrism called NOT OUT OF AFRICA did: it combines a topic of emotion-producing complexity (for Lefkowitz: the crisis of integrity in academia and ancient cultural research; for J.L. King: bisexuality in 21st century America) with another simplistic application of the 19th century *Black Buck/crazy Nigga/Mandingo* myth in modern times.
J.L. King's book is still incendiary and important, because it reveals the closet bisexual phenomenon and its actual consequences to people in both the homosexual and heterosexual community (who didn't already know about it), when combined with deceit and HIV. In fact, the only thing that could put ON THE DOWN LOW in its proper context, for the good of the Black community and the world at large, is BEYOND THE DOWN LOW by Keith Boykin.
Read this soon; read it now.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Thoughtful, intellectual, compassionate, and soulful describe Keith's Boykin's new book, Beyond The Down Low. The book is filled with interesting examples that support Keith's point that the down low is only new to the cult-like group now embracing it. Many of us have known about the down low long before it became popular. In fact, what is now considered down low is not really that at all -- at least not in the way it was previously used. Back then, no one would ever acknowledge being on the down low -- it would defeat it's purpose.
Using history, politics, and everyday people, Keith inspires us as a culture to look within ourselves enough to open up about HIV/AIDS and the down low. He asks us consider the plight of black gay and bisexual men and how society has groomed the very down low behavior it now condemns.
This book is truly inspirational, and after you finish reading it, you will have grown.
Using history, politics, and everyday people, Keith inspires us as a culture to look within ourselves enough to open up about HIV/AIDS and the down low. He asks us consider the plight of black gay and bisexual men and how society has groomed the very down low behavior it now condemns.
This book is truly inspirational, and after you finish reading it, you will have grown.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies and Denial in Black America
Wasn't very informative most of the info I'd already heard or know. It wasn't a easy read but it had tons of facts and opinion's.
Published 2 months ago by Greg D
5.0 out of 5 stars
This Book Educates ....
It is a must read! This book educates and inform us on why society demonize black gay-bisexual men. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Allison#1
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beyond the Down Low-Review
Keith's Boykin's words a have a way of inspiring and speaking the truth about a lot of Black gay lives throughout America. Read more
Published 9 months ago by Writer
5.0 out of 5 stars
food for thoug
All I can say is WOW!!! It really opened my eyes to the other world I had no idea about. This is a most read
Published 10 months ago by Bianca SOWELL
1.0 out of 5 stars
The Down Low: Misinformation and Misdirection
This book is a transparent attempt to misinform readers about the down low and divert attention away from the problems those on the down low create. Read more
Published 21 months ago by J. Douglas (Atlanta)
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good Book
I am greatful to receive this book. I have commenced reading this book and it is interesting.
Thank You;
Ralph John Davis, Jr.,
Thank You;
Ralph John Davis, Jr.,
Published on November 12, 2010 by Ralph John Davis, Jr.,
1.0 out of 5 stars
Leaping and Bounding to Unsubstantiated Conclusions
Boykin's blog is filled with misinformation, i.e., at one point he stated West Hollywood is the product of White Gay gentrification, forcing people of color out of the neighborhood... Read more
Published on January 1, 2008 by D Hunter
4.0 out of 5 stars
Informative, Insightful, but Somewhat Repetitive.
I knew very little about the term "Down Low" and the ramifications it presents. After hearing about this book during a dinner conversation, I decided to give it a try with the... Read more
Published on February 23, 2007 by D. Horan
5.0 out of 5 stars
MUST READ!!!!!!
This book was a great book. I must say when I first got the book I was in dout thats it was about anything pozitive or helpful to the black community. Read more
Published on February 15, 2007 by C. Adkins
5.0 out of 5 stars
Definately a better read than J.L. King's book
Instead of sensationalizing the issue, I felt Mr. Boykin was aiming to educate people about homosexuality in black America instead of entertaining the masses. Great book!
Published on May 5, 2006 by V. Combs
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 16
books:
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6
books
cite this book:
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- A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry on page 29, and page 205
- Invisible Life: A Novel by E. Lynn Harris on page 36, and page 244
- What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality by Daniel A. Helminiak on page 260
- The Pittsburgh Steelers (Team Spirit) by Mark Stewart on page 226
- Elton John by Philip Norman on page 33
See all 16 books this book cites
- Suicide Tuesday: Gay Men and the Crystal Meth Scare by Duncan Osborne in Back Matter
- Gay and Single...Forever?: 10 Things Every Gay Guy Looking for Love (and Not Finding It) Needs to Know by Steven Bereznai on page 66
- Sexualities in Context: A Social Perspective by Rebecca F. Plante in Back Matter
- Bi Men: Coming Out Every Which Way by Ron Jackson Suresha in Back Matter
- Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation by Natalie Hopkinson in Back Matter
See all 6 books citing this book
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