Not the Boy for You : Becoming a Black Gay Man in a Culture of Exclusion

NOT THE BOY FOR YOU is the story of a life deferred but not denied. In this deeply personal literary memoir, Angelo Robinson chronicles his journey to wholeness as a young Black gay man in America. NOT THE BOY FOR YOU is a voyage through imagination and secrecy to create a world free to accept, embrace, and love all of oneself, freed from the face of familial loyalty, societal mandates, gendered constructions, sexual boundaries, and Christian taboos. He takes on the intersection of sexuality and race and false, malicious declarations by some that Blackness does not include homosexuality because it is a behavior learned from Whites, a form of self-hatred, and traitorous to the African American community. NOT THE BOY FOR YOU grounds his story historically and culturally with research on the literary, cinematic, and photographic emergence and evolution of Black male homosexuality. This examination explores the complex and complicated reality of how the Black male body, though marginalized, has been fetishized which is central to the wider cultural production of homosexuality. NOT THE BOY FOR YOU is Robinson’s path to accepting and loving all of himself, with each step making him stronger and more empowered to confidently live out his race, gender, faith, and sexuality on his own terms—unapologetically. Angelo Robinson, PhD, is a native of Pensacola, Florida. After a successful ten-year career in Information Technology as a programmer analyst, Robinson earned a doctorate in English with a specialization in American Studies and a concentration in African American literature, culture, and history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is currently an Associate Professor of English Emeritus at Goucher College. He has presented papers on James Baldwin regionally, nationally, and internationally, and published four journal articles on Baldwin’s fiction, as well as on issues of race, gender, and sexuality, and the neo-slave narrative genre. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.