B-Boy Blues

"It was the first Black, queer male love story that I ever read. I found it at an independent bookshop in Harlem. It’s the first hip-hop love story between two Black men that’s ever been written. In fact, hip-hop presents itself as the complete opposite of anything queer, even though elements of it are inherently queer. They will never admit that because of machismo and the patriarchy. But James Earl Hardy was the first to ever imagine and tell that type of story and that immediately drew me—its salaciousness, its comedy. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s also the idea that Black, queer males don’t all look and act and behave in the same way. The thought was, in those days, that you can spot a Black queer person, because they were usually flamboyant, which made and continues to make feminine men targets of wanton and unjustified violence. Back then, you never imagined queer men could be masculine or indistinguishable from heterosexual men. James Earl Hardy talks about all that kind of stuff in a very accessible way and, also, in the language of the culture that I was intimately familiar with. This was in the 90s. I think I was 25 when I read this book. It was just so refreshing. The book made a really big impact in the Black queer community at that time, because we had never seen or read or imagined anything like it. It then had an impact on the culture and people started to want to act and dress like these characters. It had an effect on the aesthetic. People wanted a love like these two characters had. It was empowering. Yes, I’ve read the first four. It went through so many name changes. Initially, it was going to be told from the point of view of one character, Isaiah. And then I thought, ‘No, no, it needs to be told from the point of view of the two main characters,’ who became Samuel and Isaiah. So I started writing it that way and then I was like, ‘No, I think Samuel is talking more. Maybe it should be from his perspective.’ And it was then called The Book of Samuel . And then I said, ‘No, no, no, this is not working. How do I get this to work?’ And I realized that their love needed witnesses, so everybody needed to have a voice. And I thought, ‘Okay, so how do I tell this story in a way that’s not overwhelming, it still feels connected and like it’s happening in the same place?’ Toni Morrison’s Paradise and Ayana Mathis’s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie were helpful structurally. I gave all of the characters their own voices. I keep a notepad and a pen by my bed in the event that I wake up and want to write down a sentence. So, I did that one night, at two o’clock in the morning, in the dark. I had no idea what I was writing, I just scribbled something down and went back to sleep. I woke up the next morning to read it and enter it into the manuscript and I realized it was a direct address, it was talking directly to me or the reader. And I thought, ‘Well, how do I fit this in? Do I have to have chapters where there is direct address, where some disembodied voice is talking directly to the reader?’ I incorporated that and it gave the book a spiritual feel. Then I thought, maybe all of these characters, all of the voices, were, in their own way, like prophets, because they’re telling us something about ourselves whether we want to know it or not. That was when I settled upon the title and The Prophets was born."