BE NOT AFRAID OF MY BODY: A Lyrical Memoir gives us a view of life that is triple silenced, Black & queer & male

BE NOT AFRAID OF MY BODY: A Lyrical Memoir
DARIUS STEWART
Belt Publishing
$19.99 trade paper, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From an exhilarating new voice, a breathtaking memoir about gay desire, Blackness, and growing up.

Darius Stewart spent his childhood in the Lonsdale projects of Knoxville, where he grew up navigating school, friendship, and his own family life in a context that often felt perilous. As we learn about his life in Tennessee—and eventually in Texas and Iowa, where he studies to become a poet—he details the obstacles to his most crucial hiding his earliest attraction to boys in his neighborhood, predatory stalkers, doomed affairs, his struggles with alcohol addiction, and his eventual diagnosis with HIV.

Through a mix of straightforward memoir, brilliantly surreal reveries, and moments of startling imagery and insight, Stewart’s explorations of love, illness, chemical dependency, desire, family, joy, shame, loneliness, and beauty coalesce into a wrenching, musical whole. A lyrical narrative reminiscent of Saeed Jones’s How We Fight for Our Lives and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Be Not Afraid of My Body stands as a compelling testament to growing up Black and gay in America, and to the drive in all of us to collect the fragments of our own experience and transform them into a story that does justice to all the multitudes we contain.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Honesty, the true and fully realized kind, is often not kind to the subject or the teller. Author Stewart is fully honest in this memoir of Black male gayness.

The light it shines on himself, and Black culture’s fraught relationship with masculinity, queerness of all sorts, and what we seem unable to stop calling "race" despite the term’s horrifying baggage and unscientific pallor, is unsparing. It does no one any flattering favors to be seen in a searchlight’s beam. What Author Stewart set out to accomplish, so it seemed to me, was to make the cost of Othering...to the Othered as well as those who do the othering...personally real. Memoir only accomplishes that when it is honest and not self-serving.

The honesty about his sexual nature is both refreshing and difficult to read. The author’s Blackness was a lure and a weapon in his sexual arsenal. He details his encounters with white men who fetishized his skin color and their perceptions of who and what that meant he was. He does not fail to address the reciprocal fetishization, and honestly, so it did not come across in the reading as a scolding or a condemnation. His great anxitey about being perceived by others as effeminate, which is perceived as unforgivable in hypermasculinized Black culture, informs his sexual behavior. Being penetrated is the Ultimate Awful Sin against masculinity in US culture in general. Being penetrated by white men is the Ultimate Taboo for Black gay men. So, of course, what could possibly be more thrilling and desirable?

It should be to no one’s pearl-clutching amazement that young Darius Stewart found himself in the demimonde of social and sexual transgressors; and that he began to address the pain and self-image issues of being Other among those culturally Othered with self-medication aka drug and alcohol abuse. As is so often the case, this came with the risky sexual behavior that, in the 1990s, was almost certain to result in HIV infection. It does for Author Stewart, and while he is of the generation where HIV infection is a treatable, manageable condition and not a death sentence, it still had..and has...consequences that are unpleasant to cope with.

No part of Author Stewart’s journey was spared in his remembering eyes. He is unflinching in telling us how horrified he was to realize his undeniable gayness would not go away no matter how hard his childhood self prayed for it to. He could not pass as straight no matter how hard his teen self tried to. He was always, irreducibly, himself.

It takes a long time for that realization to become okay. More especially when even the Others your skin color places you among then Other you for your essential self, and heap hatred and abuse on you for this other Othering. It feels like no small miracle that Author Stewart chose to survive instead of taking the high-speed exit of suicide.

A deep self-reckoning like this book is, is a rare reading pleasure. I encourage all y’all not to miss this one.