![]() ![]() ![]() His parents are wealthy former Black Panthers whose politics have simmered into careers as a speechwriter and policy advisor (his mother) and a pharmaceutical lobbyist (his father). Through birth and circumstance, teenage Trey lives at the crossroads of the Civil Rights and Gay Rights eras. The novel’s chapters are organized into chronological “lessons” that establish it not only as a bildungsroman set in the late 1980s, but also as a playbook for survival as a politically conscious, black, and queer man in a country that means him harm. It may take some time to acclimate to the novel’s steady stream of informational footnotes, which generally gloss the characters who represent real-life public figures, but the trials and feats of the fictional protagonist and narrator known as Trey Singleton will soon engross a reader. My Government Means to Kill Me marries the radical sentimentality of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues with the jarring odyssey of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. My Government Means to Kill Me by Rasheed Newson ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |