Dropping Down Low: Online Soundmaps, Critique, Genealogies, Alternatives

This chapter investigates how white homonormative narratives perform tyrannous acts that distort understandings of queerness for people of color. As white queerness romanticizes and celebrates “coming out”—becoming the universal marker of liberation—these fascinations forge a space where other, discrete ways of being in the world appear anachronistic, backwards, or rare. McCune re-opens the case of “white men on the Down Low (DL),” if you will—to elucidate how the larger discourse of the queer triumphant, or queer progress, activates an erasure of all queers (white included) who do not fit the mold of the “out and proud” gay subject. This elision constructs a cultural amnesia around other ways of knowing sexuality outside of coming out—which enables a mis-remembering of a white queer past and present, devoid of discretion. Secondly, these constructions of a white queer past sanitize white queerness and enable a discourse that not only impacts how white queers perpetually privilege progress narratives, but potentially demonizes or distorts queers of color who perform often more illegible enactments of queerness. Bringing back the film Brokeback Mountain as a shape-shifting cultural text—globalizing an understanding of the foregone closet—the chapter forces an interracial non-romance between discretion in whiteface and blackface. Brokeback Mountain and other resonant texts perform a popular queer historiography, which misreads or under-reads the broader histories and social realities of queer people within and outside of the U.S.

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Tuskegee on the“Down Low”: A Bioculturalist Brings the Past into the Present

Out in Public ◽

10.1002/9781444310689.ch7 ◽

2009 ◽

pp. 123-142

Author(s):

Rachel Watkins

Keyword(s):

Down Low ◽

The Past

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Maybe the End of HIV

Pained ◽

10.1093/oso/9780197510384.003.0047 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 167-170

Author(s):

Michael D. Stein ◽

Sandro Galea

Keyword(s):

Social Stigma ◽

Hiv Care ◽

Rural Poor ◽

Delivery Of Care ◽

Privacy Concerns ◽

Down Low ◽

Lack Of Information ◽

Aids Clinical Trials ◽

Long Acting ◽

Hiv Drugs

This chapter focuses on HIV, which has been our most politically charged illness and a defining health challenge of our time. The world of HIV care over the last two decades has seen a great, almost miraculous, revolution. Today, a 35-year-old who was HIV-infected in 2018 and takes her daily medication adherently has the life expectancy of a 35-year-old without HIV infection. Monthly injections of long-acting HIV drugs look to be as good as daily pills at suppressing the virus, creating easier treatment. Despite these stunning advances, disparities in detection and care characterize the disease. The epidemic has shifted to groups that are hard to test, hard to get started on preventive care, and hard to keep on daily medication—persons who inject stimulants, men on the down-low, the mentally ill, the homeless, and the rural poor with no health insurance. Lack of information, lack of trust of providers, unfamiliarity with services, and refusals of testing and treatment due to social rejection and privacy concerns make the delivery of care more challenging for these groups. Even among persons enrolled in AIDS clinical trials who have found their way to cutting-edge medical treatment, blacks and Hispanics have poorer outcomes. As such, reaching an end to HIV will require new attention to health systems and social stigma, to geography, to housing and outreach, to the long work of public health.

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