Dear Write and Seekers,
Next week is the week! My book Brown and Gay in LA is officially out on Monday, September 19th, 2022.
Two days after my birthday. 🎂🥳🎉
This book took me a while to write. My very first interview for the book happened in the fall of 2012, when Barack Obama was in his first term. Same sex marriage wasn’t yet federal law. My last interview happened in 2016, a few weeks after that guy was elected. That was the same year the shooting in Pulse nightclub in Orlando happened; 49 (mostly queer Latinx and PoC folks) were killed by mass shooter and hundreds more were injured—about a year after that historic 2015 Supreme Court ruling.
This is all to say, a lot of shit was happening. I was writing a book about gay people when the cultural, political, and technological (aka Grindr) landscape of gay life was shifting dramatically. And let’s not forget, race. The Black Lives Matter was birthed in the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s murder. And with the rise of that guy came the white supremacists. Queer folks weren’t the only ones coming out of the closet!
I almost quit this book. I quit working on it for nearly a year after that exhausting first year of the new administration. But fortunately, I fell into a rabbit hole of care in the form of creative writing workshops: at the 2018 VONA I got to work with Kiese Laymon, at the 2019 Jack Jones Literary Arts workshop I got to break bread with Meredith Talusan and Imani Perry, in 2020 the poet Claire Schwartz helped me find my voice, and in 2021 I got to study writing at Tin House with Nadia Owusu and take a workshop with Jaquira Diaz. I consider these beautiful artists my ninangs and ninongs of writing. Without them, there would be no book.
This is a week of celebration. It’s my and my book’s birthday, so that’s what were gonna do. In case you care to join the celebrations and you happen to be in LA, then there’s two chances to do just that, in Long Beach (Tuesday, 9/20) and Los Feliz (Wednesday, 9/21), at my two of my favorite Southern California indies. Peep these flyers for the deets. I hope to see you there.
All love,
Anthony
Congrats, Anthony, and happy birthday to your book! Reading about your journey has been incredibly nourishing for me as I finish my diss. Some days, I feel drained and feeling at a loss for words. Other days, I go in, I “compost” old writing, and/or I feel compelled to respond to something I simply can’t ignore. Reading about how this particular book was created, written, and birthed reminds me to just keep going. I feel like I thank you all the time, but I’ll keep expressing my gratitude! All the best you and congrats again. ☺️