Will the re-emergence of Black queer men in popular media change how young black queer men view gender and desire? We have to really have to find ways of confronting and challenging misogyny in our society (across sexuality and gender identities) that disempower those who see themselves or are labeled as woman, femme, or feminine. This study points to a need to go beyond individual behavior models for preventing HIV, but undoing structures that impact people's vulnerability or the contexts under which people are making decisions. It's similar to the ways in which women are most often blamed, and sometimes killed for the spread of HIV when straight men contract the virus. For Black and Latino gay men, that same hypermasculinity is expressed in hip-hop terms - the "thug" and "downlow (not necessarily as bisexual but as able to pass as heterosexual to other black people in public)." Most other kinds of black queer male aesthetics (afro-punks - as in punk rock, afro-centric, bohememians/neo-soul, Buppies, etc.) are always trumped by hip-hop notions of masculinity.īut this study also points to the ways in which womanhood, or in this case, femininity, or one's proximity to it, marks one as the vector of disease, as promiscuous, having dangerous sexual desires, and more deceptive of their partners. It was a reaction to AIDS and the more femme and androgynous aesthetic of the 1980s (like Boy George and George Michael for white gays, Sylvester, Prince and Jermaine Stewart for Black gays).įor white gay men, they often use sports imagery like "athletic" or "jock" to connote the kind of hypermasculinity most desirable. Michelangelo Signorille wrote a book many years ago called Life Outside, which dealt with the muscle and "straight acting" obsession in white gay male culture - and the ways in which muscle culture was used to also signify healthy and not having HIV, whether that was true or not, and I would say Phillip Brian Harper's book Are We Not Men? is one of the closest Black gay books dealing with this issue. People still frequently post requirements about "must be masculine" or "no fats no femmes." I am always curious about what does masculine mean? 50 Cent? Anyone who's ever seen Black Gay Chat or Adam4Adam or any of the other outlets where Black gay men frequent for dating or sex, these notions about masculinity are abound. First, this study, unfortunately, speaks to the ways in which misogyny is very present in Black gay men's spaces. This study, while a very small sample, is interesting for several reasons. The number of new infections among young black MSM was nearly twice that of young white MSM and more than twice that of young Hispanic/Latino MSM."
Allow men they perceive to be more masculine to control the terms of what kind of sex happens, including condom use.Reluctant to allow a man they consider to be feminine to "top" them during sex.Almost exclusively prefer romantic and sexual partners they perceive to be masculine.
#Talk to black men gay chat series#
The new study, conducted as a series of interviews with 35 young/teen Black men who have sex with men ages 18-24 shows that they: According to a new study by Johns Hopkins University, the answer is no.