Robert Jones Jr. Is Son of Baldwin, and More
The writer’s debut novel, “The Prophets,” is the Black queer love story he longed to read.
Robert Jones Jr., the author of “The Prophets,” near his home in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.Credit.Naima Green for The New York Times
Published Dec. 30, 2020Updated Jan. 6, 2021
In his 1985 essay “Here Be Dragons,” James Baldwin wrote: “At bottom, what I had learned was that the male desire for a male roams everywhere, avid, desperate, unimaginably lonely.” America’s attitudes toward sexuality, he added, are tragically, inextricably linked with its “ideals” of hyper-masculinity and racialized violence.