Beautiful stories; kinda stilted, overly conversational writing. Bet it would be fabulous as an audiobook. ( )

This “memoir-manifesto” is the autobiographical story of Mr. Johnson’s coming to terms with his own differentness, which he knew from a very young age as he was growing up in Plainfield, New Jersey and fully realized during his years at a historically black university in Richmond, Virginia. The intended audience is Black queer youth, who might feel as isolated as Mr. Johnson did before he understood that he was gay, even though he was raised in a large, loving, and close-knit middle-class extended family who embraced him. And Mr. Johnson offers advice about finding community to help similarly situated youth; hence the “manifesto” in the subtitle. It is also part love letter to all of those family members, friends, and communities who raised him up and gave him a safe place in which to realize his own sexuality, the thing that made him the “different” he had always felt. He thought for some time in his youth that he might be trans, but years later came to understand he was gay. Accordingly, he addresses many issues relevant to LGBTQIA and Black identities, such as microagressions, stereotyping, gender assignment, brotherhood, suppressing the true self to conform to “norms” in society, code-switching, and generally navigating a heteronormative society as a young queer person.

His depictions of sexual encounters are graphic, including the one when his older cousin abused him just as he reached puberty but also his first consensual encounter when he was 21, but that is also part of his manifesto: he illustrates the differences between consensual and non-consensual sexual encounters, but also a general overview of the acts. He felt that he had no way of knowing what to do because there were fewer visible cultural references, and it was certainly left out from what little sex education he got in his Catholic high school. He at one time identified this sex education deficiency as discriminatory, and that might be true in terms of modern-day sex education (Mr. Johnson was 33 when this memoir was published in 2020), but it sounds as deficient as the sex education we got in my all-white Catholic school in the 1960s and even the public high school that followed. It’s hard to explore your own sexuality when you have been taught that it was your job, as a soldier of Mary, to protect boys from their uncontrollable urges and to guard your own virtue with your life, and there was never any hint that sex was anything other than something to be endured while men took their pleasure, once you were legally wed, that is. Maybe sex ed became more modern.

A frequent incorrect word usage tripped me up again and again, which takes away from my reading enjoyment because it interrupts the flow: Mr. Johnson, who is quite well educated and is a journalist, consistently used the word “me” as subject when he was referring to himself along with others, i.e., “me and my brother,” “me and my line brothers,” etc., but correctly used “I” when he was only referring to himself as subject. It’s a tic that irritates me. Accordingly, my four-star rating is a mite generous, as I really would have given it about 3.5 stars because of that, but I rounded up. ( )

Love this memoir! Got a copy from my library, but definitely plan on buying my own copy sometime. There's so many great quotes in here and great lessons to take away and I think it's super relatable for black, queer people, especially teens.

Of course, I read this for my banned bookclub and like all the other books we've read in the club so far, this one definitely should NOT be banned. I really think there should be a requirement for parents wanting to ban these books to actually read them first. They should be required to read the entire book and give a report on the book, so we know they can actually comprehend what they read (cause let's face it, most of them don't), and then they must articulate WHY this book should be banned from EVERY KID who uses that library.

Remember, when you ban books from libraries, it's not just YOUR kid who no longer has access to the book, it's everyone else's kids who use that library who will no longer have access as well. If you don't want others trying to parent your kid, why are you trying to parent theirs? This is why I think parents should be required to do these three things (read the book, give a report on it, and articulate why it should be banned for everyone) BEFORE any book is pulled off the library shelves. This could also be a good strategy to get them to stop banning books cause most of these parents complaining about these books have never even read them and won't ever bother reading them. ( )

The best part about this memoir is how transparent the author was while narrating his story. It is very open and I feel I have learned a lot about the black community and the queer community from the book. I related to some of the things that the author went through in my own way and if I had someone to talk me through it or a book like this where I could read about it, it would have made it much easier.

Thank you George M. Johnson for sharing your life and experiences with us. I know this will help many kids process things happening to them in a better and easier way. ( )

4.5
A powerful personal account on the intersection of Blackness and queerness. ( )