Its like daycare. And well get the signing set up right here. Booktv continue us now on cspan2. Television for serious readers. Saeed jones, some stories need to bullet is that a story . Guest absolutely. The earliest seeds of the book i actually started writing a week after the events that inspired it. New years, 2008 and as a college student. Went to a party in phoenix, arizona, and met a beautiful man, went home with him, started having sex, and he had what i can only describe as a true crisis of masculinity, and went from immediately like in the middle of having sex trying to kill me, and we basically just wrestled until he passed out. We were both so drunk and i escaped, and i went back to school, and literally within day is started writing out what became that chapter of the book. Writing was how i processed, regained control, regained an understand offering what had happened, why i had made it to that room and made it out, and it did save my life, and so that has always been an element of this book. Everything that made it into this story, i had to tell. Both because i felt it was story of youth to people, i think we need to understand these ideas. But also because i needed to understand and i think the writing process for me is a helpful way to kind of look in my own experiences with some distance, and try to make sense of it. Host a pretty brutal book. Guest yes, pretty intense. Pretty intense. Theres a lot of love there, and humor, too, but its a tough story. I think the perils that i grew up with is familiar to a lot of people. Its a reality for so many people in the country. If you are born in america and you are not a rich are straight, white man, you learn very quickly that youre going to have to work twice as hard to get just as far, and if you happen to be a black man, you realize youll have to do that and try not to get killed, and if youre a gay black man, good luck. That those are the stakes of our country, and i grew up aware of it, tragically aware of it because of Matthew Shepherd, who was brutally murdered when i was 12 and that same year, jamesbird jr. , black man, accepted a ride from tom three white sprem tiss they chains trim to a truck and dragged him until this body came apart. That was the brutal frame new york which i was coming into myself and beginning to understand my identity and was really scary, and writing this book, i felt it was important to reflect that bus the only thing worse than living in peril is being made to feel like you are foolish for feeling what you are feeling. And i think so much of our culture gaslights young people. So tells them theyre being to mole low dramatic melodramatickic and what youre feeling is getting to at the emotional reality of how i felt, i hope is the beginning of a bigger conversation. Host in your book, how we fight or our lives you write that become a black gay boy is a death wish. When did you learn that . What was the experience that taught you that . Guest it was really that year of Matthew Shepherd and james byrd jr. , seeing one man killed for his race and another one killed for his sexuality, while also beginning to realize i had feelings for boys. It was terrifying. Host was that theaism the same year that as you write you never forget your first faggot. Guest yeah. Host was that. Guest a boy named code cody who luffed in my apartment complex. I had such a crush on him. He didnt talk at school but during the summer he would be around the apartment complex playing with his brother and would let me hang out with him, and i remember the entire time being very anxious because i was like this is a trick. Why his being nice to me . I. Every time he would get close to me to talk, it felt like walking up to the edge of a bridge and being afraid you would fall off. Aim going to kiss him ins terribly . It involuntarily and that is so potent and that is pubty and he noticed way was looking its him differently and we got in an argument and he called me a faggot and it was the first time anyone had actually said it. And yes i was angry, was humiliated, but i also felt a bit of relief because it felt comforting for someone to just couple out and say it out loud. Think something that i really worked through in the book is that so much of harassment, so much of homophobia or racism is like soaked into our culture to the opinion that people rarely actually have to say the word. We its in the air. We feel it. It acts upon us. Host can you give an example of what you mean by that . Guest yeah. Youll notice in the book there arent scenes of me being bull yesterday at school. Im not being pushed in a locker or shoved around, made fun of. That didnt happen. I didnt not experience homophobic bullying and im fortunate but it was bullying myself. I feel like the culture in texas, in america, at that time, was so homophobic, sod my was still illegal in the state of texas until i was a junior in high school. That Supreme Court case happened 2005. So, i took it all in. I think young people are very observant. We see everything going around us and we read the writing on the wall and for me i thought the writing an the wall was back a gay black man is a death sentence. I am a generation of gay men who hiv is hiv aid is not what it was to us but when we were teenagers wait common to believe if you were gay, you were going to get hivaids and you wouldnt do but you would get it. So figure, out how to navigate what just seemed like all these Cautionary Tales while being a young person, being in the closet, growing up in he bible belt, i was very close to my mother. We had a wonderful relationship but we werent good at talking but sex and sexuality. Surprise. And when youre on your own, youll make some more stakes. Going to make concludes you wont have made if hey had better information. But in that isolation, i think i in many ways read into the worst suspicions. It breaks my heart. Makes me really sad. Im glad this memoir exists, and im glad i feel its an artifact of the past. Right . Like, i dont think queer teenaged kid, i hope, have to grow up with the same kind of experience i did. The internet, social media, television, has all changed the way people can see their experiences. Host but has its changed other peoples atitudes . You talk about how you bullied yourself. At one point it used to be other people bullying people who were perceived as homosexual, but have other peoples attitudes changed . Guest i think so. I think from many people, a crucial moment is just knowing someone of a certain identity. I think we have seen that knowing a black person has a pretty substantive impact on the way we think but race. Knowing a gay person. Knowing a trans person. So i think they visible in television and movies, that more people are empowered to be out at the work place, just in public, and books being published and creates more opportunities for people, qur or not to engage the humanity of qur people, and i think that does have an impact. Everythingings not great. What, alabama, public radio refused to air an episode of arthur because two characters were gay, got married in the upped so. And 2019. They were still far, far too many states where people can be fired for being out at work. Just last book i believe, three actually maybe this week three black tracks women were murdered trans women were murdered in United States and all of this is happening at the same time. We cant say everything is great, the work is done. But, but, i do believe it is easier for young people to find allies and easier for young people to find and connect with one another, for them to buy an education, and to receive the necessary validation that what they are feeling is natural, is normal, and its human. Even if, lets say, the home situation isnt great, its possible for them to get other feedback, and for some that just wasnt the case. Host both rockettan gay and Jacqueline Woodson blush saeeds memoir, all the book is found about being gay were also about aid aid. Gay men dying of aids, like it was the logical sequence of events. Guest yeah. That was a really painful moment. Was i dont know, 12 or 13. Win to the Public Library and i started looking for bookings about being gay. And i went to a little stack and pull them into any lap and hide them under another book because i was. Barras embarrassed and would get a big book incase somebody walks over and every book i found that day was about hiv aids, the aids epidemic and one book was lou to cope with you gay children, like it was a cancer diagnosis, so to speak to what i was saying about we are impact by the information we are able to access. That scares me. Thats all i have. And these are books. And arent books true and good and valid in right . And i always been a passionate read sore i tike it seriously and it was terrifying. I think when sex when sexuality is in your mind entangled with not just shame, about because of homophobia, but fear of death. What is that . Thats a recipe for disaster. Right . Because sexuality is a part of coming of age. These desires are part of how we make our way into being who we are. And so when you cant find way to do that without encountering disaster or fear of disaster, thats a traumatic experience. And it in a way makes what is already a lonely experience, being in the closet. Think even more painful. Host what did your evangelical christian grandmother think of your book . Guest it was interesting. She said she liked it. She told me that she stopped washing the dishes because she would so the wrapped up in reading and says she hadnt washed the dishes with said reading my grandmother, as you notice from the book is a woman of pretty few words. She said reading is a beginning of the book host pretty quick backhand. Guest true. Sharp woman. She said reading the beginning of the book where our relationship is very fraught, painful, tense, she said it brought back a lot of memories and there was like a softness in her voice. She didnt argue. She didnt push back. There was no desire on her part to correct the record. She accepted it. She said the middle was raunchy and laughed. Agree. And then i realized merck grandmother knows but my sex life, this is crazy. And then he said reading the end of the book when i wright blithe mother passing away in 2011 she thought it was beautiful and lovely and thats when i started crying. Because my mother didnt graduate from college. She took a few semester asks and had to quit because she couldnt afford it but kept in books, and her copies of james baldwins novels and Tony Morrison novels and Terry Mcmillan novels opened the book and opened my world, and i loved them so much, and those were the first black writers i read because of her experience, and so to be able to write an ode to my mother in become disform have my grandmother recognize her daughter in it, is just means the world to me. We can never truly repay love. Thats not how love works. But we can try, and i feel like this book is my attempt to pay my mother back to thank her for the books. We never talked about them but there were books everywhere. And just making its part of my life, and though everything was not great, we werent wonderful in communicating in every way. Shes as human as i am. The love was there. And the doors she opened for me just made all the difference. Host currently with buzz feed, what do you do there. Guest actually just left. Host ertz while with bus feed. What are you doing now on a daily by guest just focusing on writing. If a been working in media for six years, covering culture, news. But working on this book and getting it closer and closer to sharing it with people, i realized he wanted to be able to put my full self into the effort of sharing it. Writing a book is only part of the experience of sharing it while readers. You have to connect with them, have to be able to be present, and as you said, this is an intense book. This isnt a casual you cant have a casual conversation but this story. And i know that. And i wanted to be able to go all the way in, and when someone walks up to me, that someone did earlier today and said, loved one passed away last year, im really grateful for the book, i want to lore that and keep writing. Writing your however story its a tall board a transformative experience. You dont write a book and end that experience they way you started if its good, i think. And so im really excited to be able to write more and discover who i am now, having gone through this experience, and i feel that with everything going on in our country right now, it is my civic duty to be the best artist i can; to make substantive cultural offerings, as much as i can, because we see that theres a deep need for humanity in art, and people deserve that