What Color Is Your Hoodie?
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
In thirteen candid and provocative essays, author Jarrett Neal reports on the status of black gay men in the new millennium, examining classism among black gay men, racism within the gay community, representations of the black male body within gay pornography, and patriarchal threats to the survival of both black men and gay men. What Color Is Your Hoodie? employs the author’s own quest for visibility—through bodybuilding, creative writing, and teaching, among other pursuits—as the genesis for an insightful and critical dialogue that ultimately symbolizes the entire black gay community’s struggle for recognition and survival.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Neal's extremely personal collection of 13 essays on the experience of growing up and living as a gay black man in America, "imprisoned between the world's envy and its scorn," exudes a frankness bordering on social awkwardness. This is largely because his tone distances the reader as a curious outsider to the experience, with a voice that is strangely academic against the intimacy of topics like Neil's awakening to the beauty of the male body as a teen, his choices in pornography, his family's reaction to his voluntary circumcision as a young adult, or his shattered hopes around Barack Obama. But Neal's strong embrace of the personal as political and of popular media as culturally critical also drives him to explore queer racism and black homophobia, class conflict, and the effects of marginalization on self-esteem and self-expression. Though Neal has a unique insightfulness about often-unexamined experiences, his essays are a lecture where a coffee date belongs, or an interview with an anthropologist in the place of coffee with a friend. Moments of the collection shine as either memoir or sociological treatise, but the attempt to combine the two feels like a disconnected exercise.
