Clay cane gay

You have to go in the battlefield everyday, and that’s kind of what I did.

There’s one essay in there called “The Hip-Hop Closet” where I was going to a gay club in The Bronx at the warehouse, and they would not let trans-women in because they wanted the club to be more masculine. His use of personal narrative as a means of defining his own personhood guides readers on a dizzying journey–replete with love, pain, loss, and violence–to attune, as Cane writes, “the past and the present…experiences [that] not only form who we are: they shape our fears and burdens.”

But what do we make of the lived experiences that ostensibly shape us?

Like I did with music and with culture. I felt like each essay had a take away of equality or social justice. What do you think the LGBT community can do fight back against this?
What we should do as a whole is that we have to say “no more.” For the black church specifically… black LGBT folks in the church have this joke where it’s like, “Want to meet a whole bunch of gay folks?

As a biracial kid who grew up in poverty with his white mother, he vividly tells the stories of those he saw around him. Amid the real hard-knock-life tales, he manages to intertwine humor, nostalgia and sprinkles of pop culture. Also, there’s Jennifer Hudson. Black women have to deal with that, too. Clay Cane attempted to resolve these questions by exploring selfhood through the lens of race, class, sexuality, gender, and spirituality in America, carving out space for himself to lay claim to the power of his own identity.

The book’s cover art is a portrait of Cane surrounded by a mixed hue of nameless faces.

What is one major takeaway you want readers to grasp?
The book is a collection of 27 essays about my life, all with a takeaway of equality and social justice. Just go to the black church.” We have to say no more. And white churches are crazy too, but I think for the people in our community our churches are vulnerable spaces too, because people are looking for salvation. They are looking for healing.

So that’s why I broke it up that way, it made sense. It can be interpreted as a modicum of people central to shaping him into the person he would become. Then I met my best friend, who took me to 13th Street in Center City — after midnight, of course. Also, a lot of these guys are really young, and they need space to learn, evolve and grow.

But as far as feeling more welcome, there are some good folks there like Young M.A. and of course Frank Ocean, Taylor Bennett and iLoveMakonnen.

There is still work that needs to be done. It’s complicated, but someone like Common used to have homophobic lyrics; he turned around. Cane is the author of Live Through This: Surviving the Intersections of Sexuality, God, and Race.

So for young people especially young men who are going through these pressures of masculinity I would say that you have to live through it, you have to stay in it, and you have to look for your escapism.