May 13, 2004

9:12 PM

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.
posted by Slimemonster to (27 comments total)

How about Stuck Rubber Baby? It's a coming of age novel in comic form.
posted by the biscuit man at 9:36 PM on May 13, 2004

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.
posted by lnicole at 9:44 PM on May 13, 2004

Samuel Delaney
posted by invisible ink at 9:53 PM on May 13, 2004

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 : >
posted by amberglow at 10:02 PM on May 13, 2004

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.
posted by luriete at 10:04 PM on May 13, 2004

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).
posted by invisible ink at 10:11 PM on May 13, 2004

Tom Spanbauer's "The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon".
posted by obloquy at 10:52 PM on May 13, 2004

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!
posted by MiguelCardoso at 11:43 PM on May 13, 2004

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.
posted by mwhybark at 11:55 PM on May 13, 2004

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?
posted by Slimemonster at 12:20 AM on May 14, 2004

Catcher in the Rye, even though I kinda hate it, is probably some kind of mandatory reading for the coming of age crowd.
posted by abcde at 2:09 AM on May 14, 2004

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
posted by matteo at 2:53 AM on May 14, 2004

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.
posted by malpractice at 3:26 AM on May 14, 2004

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.
posted by jessamyn at 8:05 AM on May 14, 2004

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 : >
posted by amberglow at 11:46 AM on May 14, 2004

E. Lynn Harris is supposed to be pretty good, too, but i haven't read anything by him yet.
posted by amberglow at 11:53 AM on May 14, 2004

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!"
posted by onlyconnect at 12:34 PM on May 14, 2004

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.
posted by dnash at 2:07 PM on May 14, 2004

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.
posted by PrinceValium at 3:04 PM on May 14, 2004

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.
posted by amberglow at 3:11 PM on May 14, 2004

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.
posted by davidmsc at 6:59 PM on May 14, 2004

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.
posted by grrarrgh00 at 8:18 PM on May 14, 2004

He actually kind of liked Tongues Untied I think, actually.
posted by Slimemonster at 11:37 AM on May 15, 2004

Shudder.
posted by grrarrgh00 at 4:12 PM on May 15, 2004

Thanks everyone. This should be pretty helpful
posted by Slimemonster at 5:15 PM on May 15, 2004

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.
posted by Slimemonster at 5:16 PM on May 15, 2004

Beautiful Thing too, moviewise (it's on IFC right now)
posted by amberglow at 7:36 PM on May 17, 2004