These groups, each with eight to ten Black gay and bisexual men (total N = 74), took place in eight cities of varying HIV prevalence and geographic region: Chicago, Columbus, New York, Atlanta, Omaha, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Washington, D.C. Our initial focus groups were conducted in 1988 to assist in the development of a sexual behavior inventory. First, we conducted several focus groups nationally to poll Black gay men differing in age and background about the use of sexual language. The purpose is to highlight both similarities and differences from White gay men in the hopes of developing better “safer sex” messages for this population.ĭata for the paper were obtained by two methods. We present here some of the sexually related terminology used by Black gay men in the United States. Black gay men, quite aware of the legacy of physical and psychological intimidation by societal institutions, prejudices against both homosexuality and the Black community, and the overall lack of discourse on sexuality in the Black community, have developed even more refined methods of communicating with other Black gay men ( Garber, 1981). The area of sexuality, a prime concern of society, is one of the richest semantic fields for slang ( Sledd, 1965). Drake (1980) notes slang is a socially important group phenomenon related to group identity, used to express both alienation, encoding a disdain for the existing social order ( Dumas & Lighter, 1978) and social distance or solidarity, on an interpersonal dimension. Several studies suggest that gay men use coded terminology to a greater extent than heterosexual men and or lesbian women ( Masters & Johnson, 1979 Wells, 1989).
This allows for communication in public without fear of reprisal. Insofar as language is public while sexual behavior and feelings are often private, a schema for translating the private into the public in a safe manner is an important issue in an oppressed population ( Andrews & Owens, 1973).
For African-American men, this would be particularly unfortunate given their disproportionate risk for HIV infection ( Cochran & Mays, 1988). To the extent that such language differences exist, the impact of public health messages may be impaired. Thus, we might expect that Black gay men have somewhat different words for describing behaviors targeted by “safer sex” interventions. In addition, language is a primary means of indicating ethnic group membership either to signal similarity or to establish differentiation in interacting with another ( Bourhis & Giles, 1977 Giles, Bourhis, & Taylor, 1977 Taylor & Royer, 1980). Social isolation itself produces language differentiation. Bell and Weinberg (1978) found that the African-American gay men in their San Francisco-based study had ready sexual, but not social, access to the larger, generally White gay male community. However, the heterogeneous nature of the community suggests that gay men may not exactly share one common language, even though engaging in similar behaviors. For gay men, this has meant the extensive formulation of “safer sex” interventions in which low-risk sexual behaviors are promoted using vernacular common to the gay male community Previous research ( Leventhal, Safer, & Panagis, 1983) had found that the most effective messages for producing health-related behavior change were those that were both in the language of the target population and delivered by credible sources. This health threat necessitated rapid development of public health interventions targeting specific sexual behavioral changes in the gay male population. While gay men’s language has been of interest in the fields of linguistics and literature for several decades ( Hayes, 1976), it was not until the AIDS epidemic that “gayspeak” acquired considerable attention from behavioral sex researchers.