Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
I better not get my Black ass pulled over in hoe-ass, bitch-ass Pennsylvania, Dominick Gibson thought to himself for what must have been the fortieth time, speeding westward through the Keystone State in a rented Kia Soul that could barely maintain the eighty-fiveish miles-per-hour he’d been doing since he’d first merged onto I-80 coming out of Manhattan.
Although, getting pulled over in one of these dreary drive-by towns filled with Trump voters in whistle-stop diners and letting the officer, inevitably white and male, humiliate, beat, or haul Dominick off to jail—or maybe some combination of all of the above—would fit right in with the total shitstorm of events he’d had to endure over the last week and a half.
Just eleven days ago, Dominick had been enjoying monogamy and gainful employment in New York City. Now, in the earliest hours of this Pennsylvania morning, neither existed. He’d had very specific goals before everything had fallen apart: marriage by thirty-five, a kid one year after that, a vacation home by forty, and his own advertising firm by forty-five. But here he was now, thirty-three years old and with eight years with his ex, Justin, having led absolutely nowhere. Time was running out. Though when you’re Black, gay, and thirtysomething, time always feels like it’s running out.
The thirtysomething years are a critical age for gay men like Dominick because they have to have everything figured out by then if they don’t want to become walking stereotypes later. While Dominick was busy getting older, everyone else around him just kept getting younger. Each time he took a lingering look in the mirror, it seemed like his hairline had receded another millimeter from the last time he’d checked. Meanwhile, a new crop of boys, all with healthy hair and more-elaborate-than-ever skincare routines, kept rolling off the assembly line faster than ever.
Is everybody at the club just twenty-two now? he thought. They google how to douche; we had to learn the hard way.
Those younger men were forbidden fruit, and they would chase after guys like Dominick once he got to a certain age—that age when, if he reached it while he was still single, he would turn into the full-blown stereotype. Leering. Predatory. Old. The last thing Dominick wanted was to be someone’s daddy, a sixtysomething single man with a wrinkled chitterling dick and a hog maw butthole who thinks he’s forty years younger and creeps on anybody and everybody.
That’s the thing. If Black gay men don’t have their shit together in their thirties—the job, the two-bedroom apartment, and the boyfriend who’s about to become a fiancée and then a husband—then they’re still going to be figuring it all out in their forties and fifties when the crow’s feet start showing. And Dominick certainly did not want to be in the dating pool at forty when everyone else was twenty-two. He didn’t want to be struggling with his career at the same time either, so as he had worked hard to hold onto Justin, he had also made sure he kept climbing in the advertising world. Before it all fell apart, the two of them were planning to just settle down with each other and their peak incomes and leave all the broken and broke fortysomethings behind.
Plans gone awry consumed Dominick’s thoughts as he sped through the rest of Pennsylvania and Ohio. He barely had enough gas to make it to his mother’s front door in Detroit. But despite his infrequent visits of late, he still remembered one important thing about his hometown: do not stop for gas in the middle of the night. The low-fuel light gleamed in the dashboard as he pulled into his mother’s driveway, and he muttered a little prayer of thanks that he’d made it there without any issues. Though after almost ten hours in the car, intermittently talking to God, his best friend Troy, Siri, and an annoying woman from a collection agency, Dominick knew he would now have to talk to his mother, Tonya Gibson, who was standing in the doorway at 2:38 a.m., wondering why her son had decided to drive all the way to Detroit from his apartment in Hell’s Kitchen on a Thursday.
A half-hour later, after a quick, evasive chat with his mother and an excuse that he had a headache and just needed to sleep, Dominick laid on the full-size bed in his teenage room, his back already aching from the lumpy Art Van mattress his mother hadn’t replaced in fifteen years.
He was a gay man, a Black gay man, with a setback and without explanation.
