QUICK TAKE: This book is great and I wish I read it in high school. Hearing one story after another about a fledgling gay, surviving in the closet during his teenage years, and coming out of the closet during his college years would’ve helped me feel less alone during those times.

George M. Johnson classifies this book as a memoir-manifesto and he uses that broad genre to work out a variety of life events – being queer and being Black – but also dealing with family, community, self-discovery, shame, trauma, personal growth, and advocacy. 

The focus on advocacy tied it all together for me. Johnson wanted to create something for kids to find, so they can learn and connect from his experiences and know that being queer and being Black are not things to hide away.

“Oddly enough, many of us connect with each other through trauma and pain: broken people finding other broken people in the hopes of fixing one another.”

What ended up happening instead was parents across the United States found the book and started banning All Boys Aren’t Blue from school libraries. This ended up being quite the story, skyrocketing the book’s popularity. That’s when I came across it – from seeing all the commotion on #booktwitter.

When I was a teenager in the early 2000s, I read strangers’ blogs who were dealing with the same things as me, the same things the target audience in this book deal with today. Light themes like – facing the terror that you are going to die because you’re gay – by disease, by someone else’s hands, or by your own hands. Hearing others’ stories about things you are dealing with helps you feel connected and supported. When you feel that you are dealing with something all on your own, being able to see how someone else navigated the same things is powerful. And now, 20 years later, having a book published with these stories is still found controversial, it’s shocking. 

The greatest tool you have in fighting the oppression of your Blackness and queerness and anything else within your identity is to be fully educated on it.

If you are a teenager who is seeking connection and wanting to hear an interesting story about Johnson’s journey, pick up this book. If you are beyond those years, do what you can to amplify the message so someone who needs to hear these stories can find it or contribute to a cause that can do that for you.

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