Abstract
Are black men on the “Down Low” (DL) deceitful gay men passing as straight or postmodern disruptors of normative sexuality? Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr. analyzes DL black men who “practice discreet sexual acts while privileging spaces that are more heteronormative and that often protect or conceal their male–male sexual desires/practices” (p. 4). Through literary analysis and participant ethnography, McCune theorizes the DL as an alternative epistemology that challenges the epistemology of the closet. He rejects “coming out” as an escape from the closet to sexual freedom. Indeed, McCune finds that greater sexual visibility is not desirable for many black men, subject to state and social surveillance. Rather, the DL is a black masculine configuration borne of an aversion to such visibility and a gendered rejection of white queer sexuality and visibility. The epistemology of the DL is predicated on a historically specific black masculinity, rooted in sexual discretion and constructed against whiteness and femininity.
McCune explores black masculinity in a black gay nightclub, a phone chat line, and an Internet site targeted toward gay men. In his discussion of the gay night club, McCune theorizes the “architexture” of black masculinity to describe “how space (the physical frame) and the texture of the space (the ideological frames of gender) can create a vernacular of understanding of what constitutes appropriate gender presentation and sexual behavior” (p. 16). At first, it may seem odd that DL men patronize a gay club, but this club is a space where DL men can “come in” without “coming out.” The layout of the club McCune visits segregates the more masculine hip-hop dancing from the more effeminate techno dancing creating a hierarchy of racialized gender and sexual performances that values performances of DL black masculinity. This architexture assists DL men in constructing themselves as “normal” black men and as distinct from (white) gay culture.
Black DL masculinity operates somewhat differently in the virtual spaces of the phone chat line and the gay Internet site. Here, appropriate heterogender is primarily performed via voice, whether through the sometimes-contrived deep tonality of masculine speech or through references to black vernacular and cultural idioms typed online. Appropriately masculine gender performances produce the “political economy of the top within this black queer world” (p. 113), such that nearly all DL men claim to be sexual “tops” (penetrators). McCune notes that surely some DL men must “bottom” in sexual scenarios, for there must be bottoms (receptors) for all these tops to pair up with. In this way, the pressure to perform sincere black masculinity may preclude public declaration of diverse sexual practices and desires.
Through his ethnographic analysis of black DL masculinity, McCune revises simplistic discourses of DL men as deceitful gay men who spread HIV to black women while passing as straight in order to retain heterosexual privilege. Viewing DL men as liars legitimates homophobia against black men. McCune argues for a redefinition of “sexual passing” away from a modernist discourse of deviance, deception, and disease. Further, McCune shifts blame off of DL men as identity deceivers and onto external gazers who uncritically impute heterosexuality onto masculine black men on the basis of gender performance.
Deploying a more postmodern understanding of identities, McCune suggests the present may be a “post-passing” moment in which “identity is always fluid, and thus ‘passing’ as a functional operation is … obsolete” (p. 157). Criticizing those who name DL men as gay or straight in an effort to establish sexual certainty, McCune advances an understanding of DL men as practicing bisexuals. McCune’s invocation of bisexual is a weakness of the book. After a nuanced discussion of how DL men disrupt modernist notions of sexual identity, McCune labels DL men with a sexual identity based on object choice within a binary gender system.
A strength of McCune’s book is its mixed methodology, which brings queer literary analysis into conversation with the lived experience of DL men through ethnography to illustrate how dominant discourses of both the closet and the DL reproduce racial and sexual inequalities. The main theoretical contribution of the book is its reworking of dominant discourses of black men’s sexual subjectivities through sustained attention to the sociohistorical production of those racialized and gendered sexualities. McCune suggests that DL masculinity is constructed against femininity and leaves room for future scholars to positively define racialized and sexualized constructions of femininity. Because McCune presumes a certain level of fluency in queer theory among readers of the book, Sexual Discretion is most appropriate for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars of race, gender, and sexualities.