my government means to kill me by rasheed newson

Trey experiences it as a shadowy set of corridors, replete with private and open sex rooms, locker rooms, and revealing bath towels. Morris, a defunct bathhouse that was once a haven for gay black men in Harlem. Some of the best scenes in this novel are set in Mt.

His primary cause is HIV–AIDs activism, and he achieves prominence as a founding member of ACT UP. By the time he’s eighteen, he’s well on his way to becoming a scrappy activist in his parents’ former stead. 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. Ready to live beyond their scrutiny, Trey leaves his family’s mansion at the age of seventeen-before he’s graduated high school-to make a name for himself in New York City’s bohemia. Stringently concerned with the image their family projects, Trey’s parents are not fond of his apparent gayness and evident effeminacy in addition, they hold a grudge against him for his involvement in his younger brother’s disappearance. 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). Through birth and circumstance, teenage Trey lives at the crossroads of the Civil Rights and Gay Rights eras. The novel’s chapters are organized into chronological “lessons” that establish it not only as a bildungsroman set in the late 1980s, but also as a playbook for survival as a politically conscious, black, and queer man in a country that means him harm. It may take some time to acclimate to the novel’s steady stream of informational footnotes, which generally gloss the characters who represent real-life public figures, but the trials and feats of the fictional protagonist and narrator known as Trey Singleton will soon engross a reader.

My Government Means to Kill Me marries the radical sentimentality of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues with the jarring odyssey of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. My Government Means to Kill Me by Rasheed Newson

My government means to kill me by rasheed newson