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The Warehouse can be found up an alley from the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, the poorest borough of New York City and the birthplace of hip-hop. Its outside has no distinguishing features except a rough, unfinished wall of solid rock, painted grey. The entrance is a small, mirrored door marked only by the skeleton of an awning and a hanging canvas sign that flaps in the breeze.

With few distinguishing features apart from the crowd surrounding the front door, it seems an unlikely oasis, hidden on an abandoned industrial side street. The nearest fast food outlet is a while down the road and surrounding buildings are rusted warehouse factories or garages. It is 3am on Sunday morning and a crowd of close to 700 black and Latino men line up or are already inside.

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More Latino families populate the Bronx than any other borough in New York City and they live side by side with black families. Hip-hop, born through a mix of graffiti, break dancing and rap music, is an integral part of black and Latino culture. What began in the Bronx became a worldwide phenomenon that, since the mid-90s, has overtaken house music to become a primary influence on American pop culture.

The men at this club wear the usual attire: plaid boxers or Tommy Hilfiger briefs carefully positioned above the waistline of oversized Phat Farm or Fubu jeans that hang low.

Large baggy sweatshirts called "hoodies" or extra long singlets are nonchalantly slipped over smooth muscular abdomens, broad shoulders and chests. The men's heads are wrapped in bandanas or white nylon caps called "doo-rags." They exchange handshake greetings familiar only to the initiated and avoid eye contact while looking over each other's shoulder to see if anyone they know is arriving or watching them.

Inside The Warehouse, the aesthetic is different. A small dimly lit bar is nestled in the corner of the first room. Upstairs, the black walls of the dance space vibrate with a heavy bass rhythm. A large open space has been decorated to resemble a saloon and sets of tables and chairs are lined up in front the bar. A big screen television is on at the back of a stage. Out the back, the cement patio walls are covered with graffiti. Behind a few motley trees and coils of barbed wire, is the street and a handful of run-down shops.

The familiar throbbing hip-hop beat emanating from the DJ's booth possesses the crowd and they pulsate, holding one arm up in the air as the rhythm passes through them.

Over the dance floor, a voice booms out: "From now on, The Warehouse will not play faggot music!"

The crowd roars in excited agreement, hands flying in the air as the music surges back to full volume.

The faggot music they refer to is house music; however, it is not just house music they dislike.

Considering hip-hop's chauvinistic tendencies, it shouldn't be a shocking revelation that a club like this could muster up machismo-fuelled homophobia. What makes this scenario alarming is that nearly all of the men who are cheering are sexually active with men, and that is the reason they are here tonight.

They call themselves homothugs.

They congregate online and meet at venues like The Warehouse and they are not just a fringe group. Back sections of New York gay street magazines are well stocked with lists of options for homothugs to meet each other. "Tu Culo En Me Cara" offers merely a phone number and makes the proviso "Be in shape, all will be interviewed" while "Thugs4Thugs" asks for its black/Latino patrons to "please be in good shape."

The word homothug is a compound of two different concepts: homo and thug-- the latter taken from thug culture or thuggery-- refers to gang culture. The impact of crime on style is strong within working class black and Latino communities. With 63 per cent of people in American prisons being black or Latino, it's easy to see why. Gang culture takes its aesthetic ideal from prison. For many, having been 'inside' is the essence of glamour.

While The Warehouse advertises in many of the local gay magazines and newspapers in New York and surrounding states, even as far as Boston, this is no ordinary gay club. The men who are at The Warehouse may have girlfriends but they regularly have sex with men undercover. Some will not have sex with women at all.

For some of these men, sex with other men may only involve oral sex, reserving penetrative sex for women. Whatever the specifics are, they do not identify with the words gay or bisexual. Here, identifying with mainstream gay culture is not an option.

On the surface, they may simply resemble repressed males unable to deal with their homosexual tendencies. The difference is that they are at The Warehouse because they are looking for the same thing. Unlike the men who might secretly visit a sauna or a beat, these men are not just here to hook up for sex; they are also here to socialize.

So, why can't these men just own up and say they're gay or have bisexual identities?

In the case of homothugs, the fact that they are black or Latino is the major reason. Historically, black and Latino cultures have scorned out-and-proud homosexuality.

Ray, a Program Coordinator of the Prevention Case Management Project at a New York City HIV Health Service, works in close contact with hundreds of HIV positive men, many of them black and Latino. He explains that for many of his clients, forging ties with mainstream gay culture is a basic betrayal of their heritage.

"As a Latino man, I understand what the situation is for black men as well. With these cultures, there is a huge machismo thing that does not allow for people to deal with their sexuality," he says. "There's a tradition of black pride and of Latino pride and if you are gay, it is thought of as going against tradition."

That homothugs do not openly talk about their homosexual urges doesn't mean that they are in denial of them. From hip-hop's hyper masculine aesthetic, they create an environment within which they feel safe to explore their homosexuality. It is a complicated masculine balancing act. Macho fashion, gestures and language are the ideal. To these men, hip-hop's masculine images and often explicit referencing of violence towards homosexuals, provides them with a stylistic alternative that vehemently denies any contact with mainstream gay culture's glitter and apparent effeminacy.

For many black and Latino men, the most effective way to show that they are men in their communities is to seem as heterosexual as possible. In doing so, they are as close to the stereotype of maleness as they can be. Homophobia is seen as masculine and masculinity is seen as heterosexuality. The result is a way of life known as being on the "down low" or "DL."

DL is a term from black culture that describes an underground permissiveness for all kinds of behaviour that standard morality does not consciously allow. The tradition of DL has been around for many decades but the phrase "being on the DL" was popularised when used by hip-hop artists such as R Kelly in the 1990s when he referred to his own "down low" behaviour.

In his song "Down Low (nobody has to know)," R Kelly sings:

Chorus: down low down low (keep it on the...)
down low down low (nobody has to know...)
Secret lovers undercover on the DL
Getting' busy in the back of his Mercedes every night
Answers the phone when he goes home and let him know that
Everything is A Okay ooh baby damn this shit is tight

With R Kelly, the DL that he refers to is not just extra marital affairs. Some argue that he refers to his penchant for young girls. Last year, R Kelly was indicted on 21 counts of child pornography after videotape allegedly showed him having sex with an underage girl.

Notwithstanding the obvious moral differences, there is a difference between the kind of DL that R Kelly refers to and the kind of DL that homothugs are involved in. While R Kelly's behaviour may be the product of pederastic tendencies, for homothugs, this overt masculine ritual shows a severe anxiety among black and Latino men when it comes to homosexuality and being male.

For men like those at The Warehouse, being on the DL is a way to organise their sexuality so that in private they have a certain amount of freedom that open black culture does not afford them.

Hip-hop has always been saturated with masculine imagery and can typically be the forum for homophobia. Many hip-hop artists make their apparent hatred of gays explicit. In "Ain't No Way," DMX writes:

Let me break it down for you,
he's about to attack you
Still standin' here faggot?
You must want me to smack you.

DMX equates the word faggot, commonly used to refer to homosexuals, with an essential weakness or flaw in a person.

Diamond D's "5 Fingas of Death" contains the equally harsh:

Mad niggas be fronting the life
Popping mad shit, trying to be something they not
Your faggot ass better stay to dancing, don't even look at me
I might break your jaw for glancing, that's right

Homothug culture is a paradox. Essentially, it is a subculture that denies its own existence so that it may exist.

BJ is a 44-year-old gay black man from a black neighbourhood in New Jersey. He explains that he is out as much as he can be given that he is a working class man who needs to maintain his own safety. Because he is gay, he has never been able to fully relax and communicate completely with his mother and seven older half brothers and sisters.

"My community is very family oriented," he says. "I can't bring guys home and haven't in the 13 years that I have lived here. I saw one gay guy almost get his house burned down."

What sets this apart from acts of homophobia in general is that, according to BJ, it wouldn't matter where he went, disapproval and alienation would still exist. If he were to associate with mainstream gay culture, he would be a fetish object and if he were to out himself in the black community, he would be met by outrage and intolerance.

With no community that wholeheartedly embraces black and Latino non-heterosexual men, for many the only option is to hide beneath the mask of hip hop culture and be on the DL.

"I feel that being on the DL is a matter of survival," says BJ. "In New Jersey, I have never seen two black guys holding hands walking down the street. Being black and gay is very hard because you don't know where you belong. It's like being in two worlds and fitting into neither of them."

For many openly gay men, black as well as white, homothugs are an affront to the struggle that gays and lesbians have endured to attain social acceptance. Alphonso King, aka DJ Relentless, is an openly gay, black DJ who plays on Sunday night at Escuelita, a gay club a few blocks from Times Square.

Escuelita is a kind of oasis in the chasm between black and Latino communities and gay culture. Its clientele is comprised of mostly black and Latino men who enjoy both hip-hop and house music. It is unique in the sense that there are few venues that cater for a more relaxed gay crowd that is also black or Latino.

For King, the reluctance of homothugs to outwardly own their sexual identity and to align themselves with the mainstream gay community is something that undermines what the gay community has fought to achieve.

"It's weird that we would want to go back into the closet after we worked so hard to come out of it," he says. "Everything is switching to hip-hop. They're trying to abandon house music to 'keep it real' or to keep up this stupid homothug image. If you listen to house music, it's supposed to mean you're weak or you're old school faggot."

King asserts that homothugs are nothing more than a shallow, self-negating cultural fad led by the dominant cultural force in America-- hip-hop.

"I've seen the guys who wear tight T-shirts and vogue at gay bars suddenly switch to baggy clothing and become homothugs. They go from, 'Oh Miss Thing' to 'Yo, what's up my nigga,' almost overnight," he says. "In the latest DMX track he says, 'I got no love for the homothug' and while I don't particularly feel love for the homothug either, its homophobia like that in DMX's lyrics that means I won't play his music."

For many social or political communities, music is a central component to a sense of self. After all, hip-hop is descended from Blues and what makes it powerful is the expression of pain felt by the oppressed. Taking a form of expression that was historically used to help people through times of great hardship and using it to turn the oppression on one's self is cause for obvious concern.

But gay culture is, despite its politically progressive origins, a subculture with a social hierarchy. At the top are white males and everyone else falls into place in relation to them.

Kendall Thomas, Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia University, says that mainstream gay culture is merely a reflection of mainstream culture and the racism that lives within it.

"Mainstream gay culture is governed by the same logic as mainstream American culture," he says. "The bottom line is that gay culture has, throughout its short history and into the present, been a culture in which people of color figure more as sex objects for white people than they do as the subjects of their own desire."

Black and Latino communities have dealt with the idea of "the closet" very differently from white culture's insistence on the "We're here! We're queer! Get used to it!" ideal. Mainstream gay culture names the closet as the epicentre of gay oppression but these men aren't content with what's on the other side of the closet door.

"Many black and Latino men who have sex with men who have a history of gay socialising have become increasingly disenchanted with what mainstream gay culture is and represents," Kendall Thomas says. "It is about repudiating the ethics of sexual liberation and its affirmation of the complexity and variety of human identity".

What is evident in the fact that huge numbers of homothugs connect with lyrics that describe and encourage violence towards them and, in general, refuse to simply adopt a white gay identity, is that the plight of black and Latino men who are not heterosexual is a lot more complex and difficult than that of white men in a similar situation.

Where white men may have access to information and education as well as support about issues to do with sexuality and sexual health, more often than not black and Latino men not only do not have access to such resources and services but they are also offered no accessible role models.

Although black and Latino men face a bigger struggle than white men when it comes to sexuality, to completely divide communities because of homothugs would be destructive and simplistic.

Homothugs represent more than simply a sub-culture of fashion fetishists.

Despite their macho anxiety, homothugs are part of an emerging alternative queer presence, and we are probably yet to see the full extent of their impact. Their reluctance to attach themselves to mainstream gay culture, preferring instead to create their own community, illustrates just how complex human sexual identity can be.

Author Profile:  Matthew Phillp

Matthew Phillp is a writer based in New York. He can be read online at www.matthewphillp.com