Other DL men form romantic relationships with men and may even be peripheral participants in mainstream gay culture, all unknown to their colleagues and families. Many of these men are young and from the inner city, where they live in a hypermasculine ''thug'' culture. Most date or marry women and engage sexually with men they meet only in anonymous settings like bathhouses and parks or through the Internet. Many of the men at Flex tonight - and many of the black men I met these past months in Cleveland, Atlanta, Florida, New York and Boston - are on the Down Low, or on the DL, as they more often call it. But the creation of an organized, underground subculture largely made up of black men who otherwise live straight lives is a phenomenon of the last decade. There have always been men - black and white - who have had secret sexual lives with men. Rejecting a gay culture they perceive as white and effeminate, many black men have settled on a new identity, with its own vocabulary and customs and its own name: Down Low.
The mainstream gay world, for its part, has spent 20 years largely fighting the epidemic among white, openly gay men, showing little sustained interest in reaching minorities who have sex with men and who refuse to call themselves gay. For African-Americans, facing and addressing the black AIDS crisis would require talking honestly and compassionately about homosexuality - and that has proved remarkably difficult, whether it be in black churches, in black organizations or on inner-city playgrounds. We don't hear much about this aspect of the epidemic, mostly because the two communities most directly affected by it - the black and gay communities - have spent the better part of two decades eyeing each other through a haze of denial or studied disinterest. According to the Centers for Disease Control, one-third of young urban black men who have sex with men in this country are H.I.V.-positive, and 90 percent of those are unaware of their infection. in black men is homosexual sex (some of which takes place in prison, where blacks disproportionately outnumber whites). While intravenous drug use is a large part of the problem, experts say that the leading cause of H.I.V. Wallace ticks off the grim statistics: blacks make up only 12 percent of the population in America, but they account for half of all new reported H.I.V. And while Flex now offers baskets of condoms and lubricant, Wallace says that many of the club's patrons still don't use them. Today, while there are black men who are openly gay, it seems that the majority of those having sex with men still lead secret lives, products of a black culture that deems masculinity and fatherhood as a black man's primary responsibility - and homosexuality as a white man's perversion. Wallace and the other black men who frequented Flex in the early 80's worried just about being spotted walking in the front door. He was 22 then, and AIDS seemed to kill only gay white men in San Francisco and New York. Twenty years ago, Wallace came here for fun. (Flex recently shut its doors temporarily while it relocates.) Flex is on the East Side, and it serves a mostly black and Hispanic clientele, many of whom don't consider themselves gay. On the city's predominantly white West Side, Club Cleveland - which opened in 1965 and recently settled into a modern 15,000-square-foot space - attracts many white and openly gay men. In small rooms nearby, some men are having sex. A naked black man reclines on a sling in a room called ''the dungeon play area.'' Along a hallway lined with lockers, black men eye each other as they walk by in towels.
In the basement, the mood is different: the TV's are tuned to porn, and the dimly lighted hallways buzz with sexual energy. In the common area, on the main floor, men in towels lounge on couches and watch CNN on big-screen TV's.
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There's a large gym with free weights and exercise machines on the third floor. In its upper stories, the Flex bathhouse in Cleveland feels like a squash club for backslapping businessmen.