Research documents the link between traditional ideologies of masculinity and sexual risk among multi-ethnic male adolescents and White male college students, but similar research with Black heterosexual men is scarce. This exploratory study addressed this gap through six focus groups with 41 Black, low to middle income heterosexual men aged 19 to 51 years in Philadelphia, PA. Analyses highlighted two explicit ideologies of masculinity: that Black men should have sex with multiple women, often concurrently; and that Black men should not be gay or bisexual. Analyses also identified two implicit masculinity ideologies: the perception that Black heterosexual men cannot decline sex, even risky sex; and that women are primarily responsible for condom use. The study’s implications for HIV prevention with Black heterosexual men are discussed.

Epistemologies of ignorance describe how ignorance influences the production of knowledge. Advancing an intersectional epistemologies of ignorance approach that examines how conscious (or unconscious) ignorance about racism, heterosexism, and classism shapes empirical knowledge about Black men's sexualities, we conducted a critical review of the behavioral and social science research on U.S. Black men, ages 18 and older, for two time frames: pre-1981 and the most recent decade, 2006-2016. Our search yielded 668 articles, which we classified into five categories: sexual violence, sexual experiences and expressions, sexual identities, cultural and social-structural influences, and sexual health and sexual risk. We found that most of the research, particularly pre-1981, centered the experiences of White heterosexual men as normative and implicitly constructed Black men as hypersexual or deviant. Most of the research also color-blinded White privilege and ignored how racism, heterosexism, and classism structured Black men's inequities. We also found notable exceptions to these trends. Black men who are gay, bisexual, or who have sex with men, and research on HIV risk were prominent in the past decade, as was research that emphasized the social-structural (e.g., poverty, heterosexism, racism) and cultural (e.g., masculinity, religion) contexts of Black men's lives and sexualities. We provide 10 recommendations to avoid intersectional epistemic ignorance in future research.

Numerous studies document the adverse impact of racial discrimination on African Americans' health outcomes, but few have focused on HIV risk. We examined the relationship between racial discrimination and sexual risk in a sample of 526 Black heterosexual men and tested the hypothesis that social support would moderate this relationship. Participants in the predominantly low-income urban sample ranged in age from 18 to 45. High social support had a buffering impact on the relationship between racial discrimination and sexual risk. Among men reporting high racial discrimination, those with more social support reported less sexual risk than men with low social support. Men who reported high racial discrimination and low social support reported more sexual risk than men in any of the other groups. The study highlights social support as an important but understudied protective factor that may reduce sexual risk for Black heterosexual men who report high levels of racial discrimination.

A growing number of health and social science research findings document Black men’s adversities, but far less is known about their strengths. The purpose of this study was to explore resilience among low-income, urban, Black men. Semistructured interviews produced rich narratives, which uncovered numerous sociostructural stressors in men’s lives, such as racism, incarceration, and unemployment. Most men were resilient despite these challenges, however, and described five main forms of resilience: (a) perseverance; (b) a commitment to learning from hardship; (c) reflecting and refocusing to address difficulties; (d) creating a supportive environment; and (e) drawing support from religion/spirituality. Analysis of men’s challenge and resilience narratives revealed the need to understand and promote low-income, urban, Black men’s resilience via a broader ecosocial perspective which acknowledges the importance of social and community-level protective factors to support individual men’s efforts to survive and thrive amid their adversities.

The primary aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of MEN Count, a race- and gender-tailored three-session counseling intervention, on HIV/STI incidence as well as housing and employment. A two-armed quasi-experimental design was used to compare MEN Count to an attention comparison condition focused on stress reduction, from March 2014 to April 2017. Participants ( N = 454) were Black heterosexual men in Washington DC, largely recruited from an STI clinic. Multivariate difference-in-difference regressions assessed whether the intervention was associated with significant changes in the outcomes set, which included nonviral STI incidence, sexual risk categorization, housing, and employment. Significant improvements over time were observed across both treatment arms for all outcomes ( p < .05). Reductions in unemployment were significantly greater for intervention than for control participants (AOR unemployment = 0.48, 95% CI [0.23, 0.99]). Improvements in other outcomes did not differ significantly by treatment group. In dose analyses, participants receiving all intervention sessions were significantly less likely than control participants to have experienced homelessness in the 90 days prior (AOR= 0.31, 95% CI [0.10, 0.96]) and to be unemployed (AOR = 0.37, 95% CI [0.14, 0.96]). The MEN Count intervention offers a promising approach to address structural risk factors for STI, but not STI itself, among this largely STI clinic–based sample.