Many pop and R&B singers were brutalized by these accusations, most infamously Tevin Campbell, who experienced a terrible downfall following an arrest for soliciting lewd acts from an undercover policeman, sentencing to a mandatory AIDS education course, and a forced outing as “try-sexual” in Sister 2 Sister magazine with Jamie Foster Brown.Īt the time, a lot of the DL commentary had to do with misinformation surrounding the AIDS crisis’s impact on Black and Brown LGBTQ communities. Rumors both valid and false mounted against popular Black rappers and celebrities. In the early 2000s, the witch hunt to find and out DL Black men not only constructed a harsh culture of hyper-masculinity, but led to a number of deaths and career pitfalls. Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images Tevin Campbell circa 1994. However, DL culture - and the dying archetype of sexuality that was the DL man - are glues which only rightfully stick to urban Black culture. That isn’t to say white gay men have never been attracted to straight men. In fact, it’s deliberately going out of its way to show you the opposite. This isn’t what DL porn centering Black men tried to capture because nothing about this content caters to a Black gaze.
Another, which involves a white man filming DL Black thugs in his bedroom having sex for emergency funds, makes me equally uncomfortable. Today, there are several production companies that cater to the idea of DL Black men - one in particular stars white gay cops cruising and assaulting “thugs” on the streets, which makes me squirm. They’re Black men who, if you see them on the street, do not possess any inclination of stereotypically effeminate traits. The DL men featured in “thugporn” by nature embody the most masculine archetype of our community. Something about this genre defies the very fabrication of what is or isn’t Black or queer. Over time, this definition has shifted slightly, but the delivery has not. DL men sagged in baggy jeans they were fit and present in the streets and they always had a woman in their life, maybe even more than one. The DL man was elusive because he captured what many Black and Brown men regarded as the pinnacle of masculinity due to the heavy prison culture that threatened us and tempered our expectations of the future. The term DL, or “down-low,” was used frequently in the 2000s to describe the average Black man who occasionally had casual sex with other men. Historically, the genre never involved the white men who now dabble in it.
It’s ironic that so much content I can definitively label as gay today revolves around “DL” straight men.
Perhaps that’s why witnessing the digital death of these adult movies as the powers-that-be crack down on online porn feels so personal.įor Black queer men, the relationship between Black identity and queer sexual expression in porn is bottlenecked by content lauded as “strictly gay,” which always seems to center white queer men. Through conversations with other Black queer men, I now know I am not the only one. Growing up Black and queer, vintage “Ebony” and “Blatino” gay porn impacted my nascent views of sex and sexuality in ways that are difficult to overstate. Sexual expression is an important and inevitable part of coming-of-age for queer youth, and in the internet age, that often includes online exploration. It was the first and last time I asked who Tiger Tyson was. On the next page was a single graphic of Black men in faded jeans and Timbs laying bare-chested next to a Blatino model with a wide-gap smile. I quickly closed the browser and cleared the search history rather than waste my time.Ī year of blossoming into my sexuality later, I added the qualifier “ Black gay porn” and was shocked when Sean Cody “exotic” previews flashed across my dashboard. At the time, I allowed myself to be disappointed with the results of white men in various states of undress. I went the amateur route and typed “gay porn” into Google. The first time I sought out porn, it was in 2007 I was about 12 years old.