Petrelis Files

The Village Voice in today's "Press Clips" column does an excellent job of covering up an audit by Health and Human Services of AIDS leader Phill Wilson's mismanagement of $1 million from a federal AIDS counseling grant.

In the pertinent passage, the Village Voice omits any reference to the audit and Wilson's troubles. "Turns out the logic behind the down-low is as creaky as the headlines are dramatic. 'The down-low is being wildly reported, but it's a story without facts,' says Phill Wilson, director of the Black AIDS Institute. 'It doesn't help us with AIDS prevention to vilify black men or to disempower black women.'"

You may recall that the New York Times in its front-page Aug. 7 story about African-Americans living with AIDS, also quoted Wilson and failed to mention Wilson's mishandling of federal funds.

I find it weird that both a mainstream daily and a leftist weekly can't be bothered to inform readers of known facts about a news personality, even though the personality's fiscal problems were the topic a story in the July 31 Los Angeles Times.

Perhaps the reason why the Village Voice and the New York Times journalists have so far been lax about reporting on the HHS audit involving Wilson is because they need him for good quotes. Or maybe these publications aren't aware of the audit and the Los Angeles Times article.

As I did with the New York Times, I will forward the Los Angeles Times news account to the Village Voice, in the hope the publication will correct its glaring omission about the HHS audit.
^^^

The Village Voice

Press Clips
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Sex, Lies, Death
The irresistible pull of the down-low myth—uh, story—hooks reporters and their readers
August 11 - 17, 2004

If only to verify our existence, every so often media announce that the sky has fallen on black America. The latest cause célèbre for acolytes of Chicken Little is a reported rise in the "down low" lifestyle. Media outlets as diverse as The Advocate, USA Today, and The Oprah Winfrey Show have gathered their crack reporters to bring you the latest on this grave and gathering threat.

Outlet be damned, the blueprint of the down-low story is always the same: Black women are alleged to account for 72 percent of all reported cases of HIV between 1999 and 2002. The cause? The hordes of barebacking bisexual black men, driven underground by the black community's entrenched homophobia. For sure, HIV is a huge, disproportionate problem in the black community. But direct evidence exposing the down-low as the major causal factor is lacking.

Last month, Essence finished a two-part report with an article that carried this hand-wringing headline: "Do Black Men Still Want Us?" Answer—based on your covers, we crave Jill Scott like grits and gravy, but Mo'Nique will send us to rice cakes.

The down-low has all the makings of a sensation: Here is a tale of sex, lies, and death. Better still, here is a tale as old as America—the threat of Black Dick. In the olden days, the warlocks of lede, hed, and deck mostly saw the black phallus as a menace to white daisies. But in the era of equal opportunity, Black Dick has turned on its own.

The Washington Post headlined its down-low entry, last August, as "HIV Positive, Without a Clue," with the subhead of "Black Men's Hidden Sex Lives Imperiling Female Partners."

Turns out the logic behind the down-low is as creaky as the headlines are dramatic. "The down-low is being wildly reported, but it's a story without facts," says Phill Wilson, director of the Black AIDS Institute. "It doesn't help us with AIDS prevention to vilify black men or to disempower black women."

What drives activists like Wilson crazy is that despite the ink the down-low has generated, hard data is lacking. Researchers have no national count on how many men are living down-low, much less what down-low is. "If you answer research questions at a gay club, or if you're being interviewed in Essence by E. Lynn Harris, you ain't down-low anymore," says Dr. David Malebranche, an assistant professor at Emory University's Division of Medicine. "Everybody has different definitions and different perspectives on what this means."

The Times cited a study saying that one-third of all bisexual black men have HIV and another noting that in the Centers for Disease Control survey of a majority of the states, black women accounted for 72 percent of new HIV cases among women. "If you look at the numbers among black women and you look at how black women contract HIV, it's at least valid to talk about this as an issue," says Linda Villarosa, editor at large at Essence. Villarosa has had a few shots at the sordid tale—she authored a front-page Times article on the subject, and had a hand in the Essence version.

But the numbers are ambiguous. The oft-quoted figure about a third of all bisexual black men having HIV, according to Dr. Malebranche, was the result of research done in nightclubs in six major cities. "All you can say about those statistics," says Malebranche, "is that one out of three black men in those particular cities, who frequent those particular clubs, have HIV."

More questionable is the assertion about black women and new cases of HIV. The Times gets credit—unlike, say, Essence—for at least noting that its story is based on an amalgam of statistics from 29 out of50 states, as compiled by the CDC. Only half of the20 most populous states bothered to report. Large ones like California, New York, Illinois, and Texas—with almost a third of the country's population—aren't included.

The story's linchpin has been the accepted truth that the black community is acutely more homophobic than the rest of America. The down-low is stirring up emotions in "the often-homophobic black community," reported The Advocate. "Black men aren't allowed to have even the slightest feminine characteristics of the average metrosexual." Andre 3000, Prince, and Fonzworth Bentley apparently missed that memo. As did most of black America, whose rampant homophobia nonetheless puts it behind such bastions of tolerance as Bensonhurst, Hasidic Williamsburg, and the whole of Mississippi.

A study published last year in Public Opinion Quarterly concluded that "evidence that blacks are more homophobic than whites is quite limited." While blacks were significantly more likely to object to homosexuality, it found, they also were significantly more likely than whites to support laws against anti-gay discrimination.

What the down-low mythology demonstrates, more than anything, is an an adherence to the cult of black pathology. Black people are more homophobic, more misogynist, more anti-Semitic, more anti-intellectual, more violent, and generally a problem. The viewpoint persists despite facts on the ground.

Barack Obama rails against the stigma that brands a black kid with a book white—and yet on 125th Street seemingly a third of the vendors are selling books. Bill Cosby attacks black girls for popping out babies and being bad parents—even as the pregnancy rate among black girls falls precipitously. Ditto for the down-low. Corner pundits aren't particularly known for nuance. But when reporters start drinking the Kool-Aid, we've got trouble.