BE NOT AFRAID OF MY BODY

For “a blackboy growing up in the projects” in Knoxville, Tennessee, the stakes of coming out as both gay and HIV-positive proved to be quite high.

Stewart, a published poet and doctoral fellow in literary studies at the University of Iowa, takes his title from a Walt Whitman poem. The subtitle signals that the chapters, while rooted in memories of actual events, take the form of poetic passages in which fact is often difficult to separate from fiction. Some chapters read like prose poems, including “Delirium Tremens” and the haunting concluding piece, “Skin Hunger.” Stewart does not shy away from disclosing difficult parts of his past, including his childhood “pray-the-gay-away nightly rituals that had [him] hunched beneath the covers in the darkest dark”; teenage attempts to pass for straight (a “mission…doomed to failure”); a descent into substance abuse; and often pondering the “diminishing pleasures of succumbing to lust.” He also recalls the time “Daddy caught me prancing around my bedroom wearing my sister’s fluffy, pink slippers, pretending to be queen of my own parade.” The author reminds readers about the enduring stigma of being HIV-positive for Black gay men and other people of color, and he movingly invokes the humiliation of being called for contact tracing after his HIV diagnosis. “I was a public health crisis,” he writes. Throughout, Stewart is a candid and engaging guide to his demimonde, invoking “the thrill of being reckless” in sexual exploits and describing drag queens who “carry themselves with as much dignified femininity as a mayor’s wife.” His honest portrayal of his life is a worthy prose counterpart to works by the late gay poet Essex Hemphill, whom he clearly reveres, reprinting several of his poems in this book, including “Between Pathos and Seduction.”

A memorable portrait of Black gay life, from poverty and adversity to accomplishment and poetry.