Saturday, May 07, 2011

Comedy time - Five Red Flags Signs to 'Down Low Men'

It's the weekend, so I'm going to have a little fun.

The following video is a comical example of the dangers of not discussing lgbts issues in the African-American community.

A while back, a black gay man, J.L. King, wrote a book talking about "down low" black men, or black men who are secretly gay while maintaining a heterosexual facade.

The book was featured on Oprah and all hell broke loose, as it does in all situations of ridiculous moral panics.

African-Americans (particularly black women) practically flipped out over the real notion that there is such thing as closeted gay men. Fueling the madness was the now debunked belief that these men were causing the HIV rate to go up in the black community, chiefly amongst black women.

Seminars, books, and talk shows spread across the country supposedly giving tips about how to "detect down low men." Strangely enough, the idea of having a real conversation about homophobia in the black community never crossed the mind of these "concerned individuals."

The following video is an example of this insanity. According to this lady on the video, the red flags of "down low men" are men who:

don't check their nails palm down,

chew gum loudly,

chooses to blow something out of a man's eye,

pronounce their "esses better than a rattlesnake,"

and fart silently. Apparently a heterosexual man's fart is supposed to make noise.

No disrespect to the lady in this video, but I think she is serious:







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11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Youtube is the devil. :)

Joel said...

There is no shame in disrespecting those too stupid to seek out the truth. Disrespect her all you want.

glendenb said...

There's a lot of men on DL in Utah - it's the Mormon thing. They're told by their bishops to get married and the gay feelings will go away. I've found the surest sign of a man on the DL is that he's having sex in a park with other men on his lunch hour. That one's a real give away.

Come to think of it, here's the Utah five:
5. Knows where Oxbow Park is.
4. Talks fondly about the old Deseret Gym (if over 40) and/or spends friday nights at the Sugarhouse Park and/or 24 hour fitness. Compliments the locker rooms.
3. Refers to you (his wife/girlfriend) as "girl"
2. Knows what color your eyes are and helps you fix your hair and your daugthers' hair
1. "Forgets" to wear his temple garments to work on sunny days and comments about going to "oxbow park"

Dawn said...

I agree with Joel.

Donny D. said...

Wow, this is just a classic example of anti-bisexual male sentiment on the part of straight women. But there are two unusual things here:

1) The advice the young woman in the video is giving to other women is being broadcast publicly. Normally straight women talk about this among themselves, telling each other it's "so important" to avoid getting involved with men who are "gay". Nowadays we homosexual people are fine (sort of) if we stay over behind the fence in our little homo reservation, but if we affect their lives the LEAST little bit, it's a terrible crime. Now people's right to not have sex with someone trumps everything else, I'm not arguing otherwise. However, when people reject others as intimate partners for bigoted reasons, they don't deserve to be free from criticism for it.

2) The video-making is explicit that she is anti-bisexual. This is unusual in that so many straight people can't seem to tell the difference between someone who is bi and someone who is gay.

By the way, her list of "red flags" is a bunch of stereotypical behaviors that sound like those describing what some of us might call "a big ol' queen" and taken together, not someone most straight woman would get involved with.

Donny D. said...

Just one more thing:

Her hilarious yet cringe-worthy paeon to straight male flatulence, was, well, a little strange.

Mykelb said...

She's just another ignorant bigot. End of story.

Penny Marie Sautereau said...

Um.... do any of you ever actually read descriptions below these videos or comments? The woman is a YouTube Commedienne. She's MOCKING bigots, not actually BEING one. It's a Poe's Law thing. She plays the role so well none of you could tell she was joking. Which you'd have known had you scrolled down JUST a teeny bit on the actual YouTube page for the video. Then again how many of you actually clicked through TO the Youtube page? That's a problem with embedding, you see only the video and lose a WHOLE lot of actual context.

BlackTsunami said...

I don't know Shaman. I read the comments and she seem serious to me.

Unknown said...

Silent farts... eh, we do have the phrase "Silent But Deadly" for a reason.

Penny Marie Sautereau said...

I read her comments and she seemed clearly winkwink nudgenudge to me. Having had to see through my stepdather's Monty Python marathons I'm pretty good at spotting winkwinknudgenudge.