As McCune tracks how African American men adopt, resist, and disavow the DL as a meaningful sexual identity, he handles these different sites with analytical rigor, deftness, and sensitivity – important given the constant barrage of misinformation fueling the DL controversy.
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The book explores an impressive range of social venues – from the Oprah TV show to the inner workings of a popular Chicago nightclub from online chat rooms to the sexual contests occurring across black literary history. “McCune’s Sexual Discretion is an exciting, timely, and important study that blasts the now encrusted mythologies about the so-called 'down low,' advancing our understanding of the mass mediation and lived experiences of sexually nonconforming African American men while also stretching and challenging ethnographic methodology and racial theories of sexuality. Read More about Sexual Discretion Read Less about Sexual Discretion Sexual Discretion details the causes, pressures, and negotiations driving men who rarely disclose their intimate secrets. Lynn Harris’s contemporary sexual passing novels to McCune’s own interviews and ethnography in nightclubs and online chat rooms.
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Kelly’s epic hip-hopera series Trapped in the Closet to Oprah’s high-profile exposé on DL subculture and from E. Within these underground DL communities, men aren’t as highly policed-and thus are able to maintain their public roles as “properly masculine.” McCune draws from sources that range from R&B singer R. provides the first in-depth examination of how the social expectations of black masculinity intersect and complicate expressions of same-sex affection and desire. Sexual Discretion explores the DL phenomenon, offering refreshingly innovative analysis of the significance of media, space, and ideals of black masculinity in understanding down low communities. Commonly referred to as “down-low” or “DL” men, many continue to have relationships with girlfriends and wives who remain unaware of their same-sex desires, and in much of the media, DL men have been portrayed as carriers of HIV who spread the virus to black women. African American men who have sex with men while maintaining a heterosexual lifestyle in public are attracting increasing interest from both the general media and scholars.