My Government Means To Kill Me by Rasheed Newson

This book took me a while to get into the rhythm of it, but as it went along I really fell in step with it and loved it. It is the only work of fiction that I have read that has extensive footnoting to edify the reader as to who some of the well known people that play a role in the story are, as well as what significance some of the places hold. This is the story of Trey Singleton, who is the one who tells it. He is a teenager who lives at the crossroads of the Civil Rights and Gay Rights eras. His parents are wealthy former Black Panthers whose politics have simmered into careers as a speechwriter and policy advisor (his mother) and a pharmaceutical lobbyist (his father). Overly concerned with the image their family projects, Trey’s parents are not fond of his apparent gayness and evident femininity; in addition, they hold a grudge against him for his involvement in his younger brother’s disappearance, something they all seem to regret, and on various levels played a role in, to their collective chagrin. Trey is ready to leave home at the age of seventeen and to make his way in New York City. Trey’s savings don’t last for long, and he suspects that his family is surveilling him from afar, but he does achieve independence, with all the precarity that entails. By the time he’s eighteen, he’s well on his way to becoming a scrappy activist in his parents’ former stead. His primary cause is HIV–AIDs activism, and he achieves prominence as a founding member of ACT UP. He is tender, intelligent, exposed to the early AIDS era at a young age, and he does not look away, he leans in. Some of the scenes in this novel are set in Mt. Morris, a defunct bathhouse that was once a haven for gay black men in Harlem. Trey experiences it as a shadowy set of corridors, replete with private and open sex rooms, locker rooms, and revealing bath towels. His descriptions of the site are immersive and dangerous. As a non-gay, non-black reader, I felt led by the hand through a world I would only know through fiction.