On the Down Low on Brokeback Mountain

About five years ago, I decided to post a personal ad on Yahoo Personals. I mulled this over for weeks before submitting the posting. What I knew as an older comfortably out gay man who had, as they say,"been around the block," was that I hoped to meet another single older guy who would share some of my own commitments to the arts, theology, travel, family and the idea that there is more to a relationship than sex.

My frank opinion was that this posting would bring in zero replies. But, well, why not try it? So I submitted my carefully crafted submission and began to check into the reply box. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered in the first week that ten men of ages ranging from the thirties to the seventies had answered.

What struck me immediately was that none evidenced having read my submission. The basic answer went like this: "Read your posting. Am happily married but enjoy the guys also. Have afternoons free. Answer soon."

As someone who prided himself on having been "around the block" and "seen it all" I was stunned by these answers. Most of the respondents were on the down low or on the DL. In case you aren't acquainted with this term, here is the National Center for Disease Control definition of it: "The most generic definition of the term down low or DL is to keep something private," whether that refers to information or activity. The term is often used to describe the behavior of men who have sex with other men as well as women and who do not identify as gay or bisexual. These men may refer to themselves as being 'on the down low,' ';on the DL,' or 'on the low low.' The term has most often been associated with African American men. Although the term originated in the African American community, the behaviors associated with the term are not new and not specific to black men who have sex with men."

In order to reply to these responses, I drafted a short paragraph in which I tried to communicate clearly that I am a Christian out gay man who has already told his own secret and who does not want to keep the secret of another from a wife. One of the recipients of this note wrote and thanked me for the answer and for helping him reconsider his situation.

When my partner and I went to see Brokeback Mountain at the Keystone Cinema last month, I vividly remembered this surprising experience with men on the DL. In the movie based on novelist Annie Proulx's New Yorker short story, cowboys Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) establish a lifelong intimate relationship in remote Wyoming mountains. The movie is set in 1963 and as would have been fairly typical of that time, most men who loved men ended up getting married to women. This happened to Jack and Ennis.

This tragic movie set in expansive breathtaking mountains and plains is about the harm that happens to men and their families when they are unable to tell their own truth to themselves or to anyone else. For me, the most heartrending parts of the film had to do with the way that both men managed to sideline loving wives and children. So even though the film is about two men, it is very much about the women and children in their lives.

This film has been acclaimed rightly as a great film, a breakthrough in its portrayal of gay life. OK, maybe that is true: Yesterday we had fabulous young guys on TV in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Now we have rugged gay cowboys. The more important thing about this film is that it is a kind of cautionary tale about what happens when truth cannot be claimed openly. The message is that hiding on the DL harms beyond repair and even into death everyone who is on the DL and connected with them.

The reason that the Center for Disease Control even bothers to put a definition of
"down low" on its web site (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/pubs/faq/Downlow.htm) is that one of the prices of this behavior is an increase in the incidence of HIV/AIDS among the women of guys who are on the DL. HIV/AIDS doesn't figure in the movie. But the movie points clearly to the deadly consequences of hidden patterns of behavior.

I hope that everyone who has read these comments will go see Brokeback Mountain and will post their take on the film here. Whatever your views, the film is surely one of the greats of recent times.

And now just a final comment about the Yahoo Personals site: Altogether I received twelve responses. Just when I was about to close down the ad as a disaster, I received a wonderful long response from a man who had really read my posting and who possessed all of the qualifications I had been looking for. We are life partners now. I guess that the personal ad was not a waste after all!