“All’s quiet on the ‘down low’” The Larry Sinclair Radio Show on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 (Barack Obama – Donald Young) 8PM Pacific

http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/books/1088034,SHO-Books-elynn03.article

EXCERPT

That he can now tell a different type of story can be attributed to his success, his storytelling ability and the evolvement of attitudes about black gay culture that didn’t exist at the time of his 1994 debut, Invisible Life. The book was a coming-of-age story that dealt with the then-taboo topic of the ”down low,” or bisexual black men living as heterosexuals.

”If you were African American and you were gay, you kept your mouth shut and you went on and did what everybody else did,” he said. ”You had girlfriends, you lived a life that your parents had dreamed for you.”

He sold his book at beauty salons, pushing the story to a black middle class that rarely saw itself in fiction. And he brought up homosexuality, a topic that had been a difficult discussion in black society. Yet Harris, who felt compelled to write Invisible Life, was not living as an openly gay man and could not acknowledge the parallels between the book and his life.

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