Comments on: Recommendations of books for gay teen African-Americans?

Question: Recommendations of books for gay teen African-Americans?

Slimemonster — Thu, 13 May 2004 21:12:00 -0800

Anybody know any book/movie recommendation i can make to a 16-year old, gay, African-American kid who's just "coming of age" though he hates that phrase. He's reading everything he can on the subject and looking for more. Fiction and non-fiction.

By: the biscuit man

the biscuit man — Thu, 13 May 2004 21:36:07 -0800

How about Stuck Rubber Baby? It's a coming of age novel in comic form.

By: lnicole

lnicole — Thu, 13 May 2004 21:44:19 -0800

which subject is he looking for more on... being a teenager? African-American? gay? coming of age?

in case you're looking for all of the above, yesterday i just finished reading a coming-of-age novel about a gay African-American teenager (well, then she got older) called Ain't Gonna Be The Same Fool Twice by April Sinclair. It's more on the chick-lit side of things, but I found it entertaining and the character is easy to relate to.

By: invisible ink

invisible ink — Thu, 13 May 2004 21:53:56 -0800

Samuel Delaney

By: amberglow

amberglow — Thu, 13 May 2004 22:02:11 -0800

Stonewall, by Duberman (novel charting the lives of people at the time, and involved)

Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past

Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction (a really good sampling of famous names to read more of)

Becoming Visible: A Reader in Gay & Lesbian History for High School & College Students (ditto)

and James Baldwin, Christopher Bram....i'll post more tomorrow : >

By: luriete

luriete — Thu, 13 May 2004 22:04:11 -0800

Paul Beatty's Tuff is a good read. The protagonist is African American and about 18 or 19, growing up in Harlem and trying out how to deal with the adults and tough guys around him, how much dope smoking is too much, and whether or not compulsive masturbation is healthy. It was funny as fuck and the characters were really well-drawn. I liked it a lot.

Ernest Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying is about being young, black and faced with monumental injustice - and growing up in the face of imminent death. A tremendous book that really moved me when I first read it at 15 and even moreso when I re-read it last year.

By: invisible ink

invisible ink — Thu, 13 May 2004 22:11:12 -0800

I second amberglow's recommendation of James Baldwin. My personal favorite is Giovanni's Room.

Also, Bending the Landscape is a fantastic sci-fi anthology, in which the editors asked contributors to "imagine a different landscape... some milieu that had not happened" and then address the theme of Alien or Other, with the Other being a lesbian or gay man. The real eye-opener in that book for me, was a piece called "A Real Girl" by Sheriann Lewitt (needless to say, don't let the title deceive you).

By: obloquy

obloquy — Thu, 13 May 2004 22:52:10 -0800

Tom Spanbauer's "The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon".

By: MiguelCardoso

MiguelCardoso — Thu, 13 May 2004 23:43:06 -0800

I disagree with the idea of specialized literature. Why condemn the boy to the "black and gay" ghetto? A disproportional amount of great authors were gay - but most of them white - but, so what, that's beside the point, surely.

If gay and modern is important: Proust, Walt Whitman, Fernando Pessoa, Cavafy, Hart Crane, Frank O'Hara, James Merrill, Thom Gunn, the novelists Gore Vidal and Armistead Maupin. But also women like Marguerite Yourcenar and Mary Renault. That's more than enough to be getting on with.

James Baldwin was a great writer but, at sixteen, imho, he needs literature as it is, rather than conformism and convenience. He needs expanding rather than limiting. Reading is a pleasure; not a duty!

By: mwhybark

mwhybark — Thu, 13 May 2004 23:55:21 -0800

That's Samuel Delany, ii. No offense intended - I just imagine it might be easier with the name spelled correctly.

Delany is a gay African American writer whose early career includes some really amazing, groundbreaking SF. Later he explored racial and sexual fetish in a thoughtful manner in the context of potboiler fantasy with his Neveryona books.

My favorite work of his is the early seventies master work Dhalgren, which is by no means an easy read, but which opened my head in ways I still haven't finished counting up.

His more recent material is generally either autobiographical or lit-crit and theory. He's brilliant and well worth reading, no matter your racial heritage or sexual orientation. I was a huge fan for years before I learned about him as a person, and it added several dimensions to the earlier works.

By: Slimemonster

Slimemonster — Fri, 14 May 2004 00:20:55 -0800

I read something by Samuel Delany in the Dark Matter anthology. I liked it. Also, I didn't mean to imply that he only wants to read books about the black and gay experience, but that happens to be a perspective I'm know he relates to and wants to find more about and books about it are really not that numerous. I certainly wouldn't say there's anything limiting about it, but thanks to everyone who's posted so far. anyone else?

By: abcde

abcde — Fri, 14 May 2004 02:09:36 -0800

Catcher in the Rye, even though I kinda hate it, is probably some kind of mandatory reading for the coming of age crowd.

By: matteo

matteo — Fri, 14 May 2004 02:53:57 -0800

films: Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Renoir's Grand Illusion
books: Rilke's Letters To a Young Poet, Italo Calvino's Baron In The Trees

By: malpractice

malpractice — Fri, 14 May 2004 03:26:51 -0800

Anything at Young Bottoms in Love. I wish such things were available when I was that age. Otherwise, I personally found the Joe Orton diaries to be marvellously character building.

And I second MiguelCardoso's recommendation of Mary Renault. Great stuff, when you're a teen!

If anything, he must read Boy Meets Boy. It's fucking fantastic.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Fri, 14 May 2004 08:05:25 -0800

Stuck Rubber Baby is an amazing book that tackles a lot of complicated issues and is an engaging read. Another graphic novel with a gay black character is Chelsea Boys which has a pretty good web site to boot. One other coming of age book about gay multicultural teens is Entries from a Hot Pink Notebook by Todd D. Brown. Here's the big entry from the GLBTQ encyclopedia about African American literature which has many more names.

I disagree with the idea of specialized literature. Why condemn the boy to the "black and gay" ghetto? A disproportional amount of great authors were gay ... at sixteen, imho, he needs literature as it is, rather than conformism and convenience. He needs expanding rather than limiting. Reading is a pleasure; not a duty!

No one said it was a duty. In fact Slimemonster clearly said the kid was looking for more on the subject. One of the problems gay kids face, epsecially gay non-white kids, is the feeling that there is no one else like them in the entire world. High school does not help this. Most literature kids get to read in school is about white people, and straight people. It is expanding his reading horizons to point him to more books that break out of these constraints.

By: amberglow

amberglow — Fri, 14 May 2004 11:46:29 -0800

what jessamyn said---i wish there were all these resources when i was in high school, and a way to find them.

Add in everything by Michaelangelo Signorile, Larry Kramer, Oscar Wilde, and David Leavitt maybe, and some Ginsburg, and Paul Monette (good writer, but sad), and Our Lady of the Flowers by Genet, and Counterfeiters by Gide, and most everything on this list : >

By: amberglow

amberglow — Fri, 14 May 2004 11:53:32 -0800

E. Lynn Harris is supposed to be pretty good, too, but i haven't read anything by him yet.

By: onlyconnect

onlyconnect — Fri, 14 May 2004 12:34:01 -0800

The cancelled "My So-Called Life" TV series dealt with gay coming-of-age themes in what I thought was a sensitive way, and treated coming to terms with it as part of a spectrum of adolescent angst-inducing issues instead of as some terrible isolating problem. My favorite tv series ever. "Go, now. Go!"

By: dnash

dnash — Fri, 14 May 2004 14:07:00 -0800

Ditto the mention of Spanbauer's "Man Who Fell In Love With the Moon," and also his "In the City of Shy Hunters." Two of my favorite books ever.

When I was in the closet in high school, John Fox's "Boys on the Rock" helped me a lot. It's about a young guy struggling with the realization that he's gay - set in the mid-60's near NYC. What I liked about is that the kid is a jock on the swim team, so he's not "stereotypical" at all.

By: PrinceValium

PrinceValium — Fri, 14 May 2004 15:04:55 -0800

It is expanding his reading horizons to point him to more books that break out of these constraints.

But that doesn't necessarily mean "black and gay" - it means outside the mainstream; unique; different. Catcher in the Rye is perfect. It doesn't matter that the hero was a white preppie kid who chased girls. The themes are relevant.

Fantasy novels might actually be a good idea - he might be a Tolkien fan in disguise.

By: amberglow

amberglow — Fri, 14 May 2004 15:11:27 -0800

most fantasy novels would work--dorothy, harry potter, whoever...
they usually feature kids either different, or out of their element. It's a standard theme. I think he's looking for more specific stuff--we tend to identify with those characters anyway.

By: davidmsc

davidmsc — Fri, 14 May 2004 18:59:12 -0800

The Fountainhead.

It transcends race, gender, orientation, culture, etc, and will provide the lad with at least a basis for forming a philosophy that will serve him well.

By: grrarrgh00

grrarrgh00 — Fri, 14 May 2004 20:18:31 -0800

What's the status of the guy's life right now? Is he out to his family, friends? If so, is his family being supportive and does he have good friends?

When I was a gay black closeted teenager, I can't tell you how much I identified with The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man, by James Weldon Johnson. Being black and gay is a tough enough intersection of identity to navigate, being black and closeted, constantly hearing yourself derogated unwittingly by those you love -- un-fun. Johnson's narrator inhabits a closet of a different sort.

To further explore the phenomenon of being marginalized within black culture, there's Joan Morgan's wonderful When Chickenheads Come to Roost: My Life As a Hip-Hop Feminist.

If he's totally OK with his gayness, and everyone around him is, too, find him a copy of Paris Is Burning — beautiful portrait of a gay, black, amazing, parallel world, with all its attendant sites of wonder and horror. (I don't care what anyone says, keep the boy away from Tongues Untied or Chocolate Babies, at least until he's older. Shudder.)

Also, given that apparently one in three of us young gay black men has HIV, and not too many of us know it, please, please, please scare him, bribe him, cajole him, annoy him, whatever you have to do, just get him to educate himself completely about the transmission of HIV.

Oh, and please don't make the boy read Whitman. It'll happen on its own. You can't be gay and not be fed Whitman at some point. And while I know there's some horde of gay men out there claiming to have had a transformative epiphanic Leaves of Grass moment, I haven't met any of them, and I really think it's a successful mass-propaganda effort by five sentimental-but-retrogressively-progressive old ladies who run the Society for the Preservation of Walt Whitman. I love you, MiguelCardoso, but limiting can be good, even at 16. I wish someone had limited Frank Peretti right out of my hands when I was 16. Guidance. Not censorship, just guidance. Blech.

By: Slimemonster

Slimemonster — Sat, 15 May 2004 11:37:14 -0800

He actually kind of liked Tongues Untied I think, actually.

By: grrarrgh00

grrarrgh00 — Sat, 15 May 2004 16:12:23 -0800

Shudder.

By: Slimemonster

Slimemonster — Sat, 15 May 2004 17:15:54 -0800

Thanks everyone. This should be pretty helpful

By: Slimemonster

Slimemonster — Sat, 15 May 2004 17:16:57 -0800

Yeah, I'm not too sure I got it either, grrarrgh, but I do remember stealing it from a public library many years ago...I might have it somewhere.

By: amberglow

amberglow — Mon, 17 May 2004 19:36:08 -0800

Beautiful Thing too, moviewise (it's on IFC right now)