Dec 10, 2004  |  By: RYAN LEE  | COMMENTS     

he has contributed $100,000 to help establish the Lillie Mae King Foundation to deliver HIV-prevention messages to under-targeted gay and bisexual men.

Boykin’s book criticizes the media’s unquestioning acceptance of King, who originally landed on the national scene in a New York Times Magazine profile as the operator of a “DL” Internet porn site, as an expert on HIV and black sexuality.

Kelly McBride, an ethics faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based journalism school and think tank, also questions how media outlets automatically accept at face value the word of King, who has no experience in health care or sociology.

“We don’t vet our experts very well, and as journalists we need to do a better job of doing that,” McBride says. “If his only credentials are he used to run a Web site and he used to participate in the down low life, that doesn’t make him a sociologist, and we should not make him a sociologist.”

King says he never purported to be an expert. The biographies that appear in his book and on his Web site refer to him as “an HIV/STD prevention activist, educator.”

Mary Mitchell, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and an African-American woman who regularly writes about the down low and other black issues, said if the information King is spreading about the down low is untrue, then black gay men, not the media, are responsible for challenging what he’s saying.

“J.L. King is well known [in gay circles] and if he was a fraud, they should have come out and told their story,” Mitchell says. “I just don’t think we understand the black gay community, and so King can say whatever he wants to say because it’s such a closed community. That’s how he got away with it.”

An appearance on trong>Oprah Winfrey’s talk show earlier this year gave King widespread exposure.

Some black gay men protested King’s message, but they didn’t receive the same media attention, says Boykin, who hopes his book will spark new discussions among blacks and the media about the complex cultural factors surrounding the down low.

McBride at the Poynter Institute doubts Boykin’s book will cause the same stir that King managed to build.

“It’s never going to be as big as that [New York Times Magazine] piece, and that is one of the problems of reporting — you can never duplicate what you’ve already done,” she says.

But Boykin, who contends that there are limited examples of thorough, in-depth reporting on the down low and positive media representations of black men who have sex with men, says he hopes the media will correct the inaccuracy of their earlier stories.

The first eight chapters of Boykin’s book challenge popular conceptions about what being on the down low means. Boykin uses pop culture and current events to show that men and women of all ethnicities and sexual orientations — from former New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey to the female R&B trio TLC — partake regularly in sexual relations outside of committed relationships.