Rage
On Being Queer, Black, Brilliant . . . and Completely Over It
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A debut book from Entertainment Weekly writer and former Out magazine editor Lester Fabian Brathwaite, Rage is a darkly comedic exploration of Blackness, queerness, and the American Dream, at a time when creative anger feels like the best response to inequality.
One romantic hopeful had greeted Lester Fabian Brathwaite on a dating app with this gem: “You into race play?” Being young, queer, gifted, and Black, Lester has found that his best tool for navigating American life is gallows humor. If you don’t laugh, you cry—or, you summon your inner rage. With biting wit, Lester’s book Rage interrogates all the ways that systemic racism and homophobia have shaped our society. All to pose that proverbial question: Can a gurl live?
Rage is one part memoir, one part cultural critique, one part live grenade. He contrasts his tragic-comedic love life with the ideals he had formed from bingeing (straight, white) Hollywood depictions. And he is quick to side-eye the misogyny and internalized homophobia that some people reveal in statements like “masc for masc” on dating profiles. Lester also dives deep into representations of queer life from RuPaul’s Drag Race to The Birdcage (Robin Williams was a snack in Versace), and explores our cultural understanding of Black genius through stories of James Baldwin, Whitney Houston, and Nina Simone.
Lester’s razor-sharp voice, coupled with his searing social commentary on topics such as dating, rejection, racism, sexuality, identity, and more, offer an increasingly divided world an engaging and original read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Entertainment Weekly reporter Brathwaite turns his sharp eye on race, sexuality, and body image in this passionate debut memoir-in-essays. "It's just really hard sometimes," he writes in the opening chapter, "to not be Black enough for Black people, and to feel like an outsider among the gays." Building on that insight, he delivers 10 provocatively titled essays ("I Hate the Gays," "Fucking White Boys") that unpack the adverse effects of Eurocentric male beauty standards, analyze depictions of queer life in popular media, and probe the idea that Black genius was "cultivated in spite of society, never because of it." Throughout, Braithwaite's candor fluctuates between appealing and off-putting. For instance, his winking acknowledgement that he's "developed a really unhealthy obsession with myself" elicits smiles, while his characterization of injecting himself with steroids as "moderate, responsible drug use" necessary to keep up with the "extreme bodies currently prevalent" in bodybuilding will cause many readers to wince. For the most part, the heightened tonal register allows Brathwaite to effectively communicate his frustrations with white gay culture while reserving adoration for the people and art he loves. It makes for bracing reading.
