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Be Not Afraid of My Body: A Lyrical Memoir
From an exhilarating new voice, a breathtaking memoir about gay desire, Blackness, and growing up. Darius Stewart spent his childhood in the Lonsdale projects of Knoxville, where he grew up navigating school, friendship, and his own family life in a context that often felt perilous. As we learn about his life in Tennessee—and eventually in Texas and Iowa, where he studies to become a poet—he details the obstacles to his most crucial hiding his earliest attraction to boys in his neighborhood, predatory stalkers, doomed affairs, his struggles with alcohol addiction, and his eventual diagnosis with HIV. Through a mix of straightforward memoir, brilliantly surreal reveries, and moments of startling imagery and insight, Stewart’s explorations of love, illness, chemical dependency, desire, family, joy, shame, loneliness, and beauty coalesce into a wrenching, musical whole. A lyrical narrative reminiscent of Saeed Jones’s How We Fight for Our Lives and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Be Not Afraid of My Body stands as a compelling testament to growing up Black and gay in America, and to the drive in all of us to collect the fragments of our own experience and transform them into a story that does justice to all the multitudes we contain.
276 pages, Paperback
Published February 6, 2024
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171 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 4, 2024
A moving account of growing up Black and Queer in a southern US State, coming to terms with feelings, impulses, and consequences. Beautifully written.
May 18, 2024
Having the chance to listen to Darius live read from his lyrical memoir, changed my perspective on the creativity of writing.
May 4, 2024
Insignificant, pint-sized, and almost meaningless memoir that is very poorly written. There is so little to this book that the five-star ratings and overhyped comments are laughable, obviously made to support this author's racist political wokeness. Endorsements include other authors saying, "This book is a mammoth creation." Huh? "Reimagined the form of the American memoir." Seriously? It's a dinky, dull and standard bunch of nothingness from a writer whose life is not special.
How about comments like "dazzlingly propulsive" and "memorable portrait of black gay life." I defy anyone after reading this to recall much of anything beyond the fact that near the end the writer finds out he's HIV+ and suddenly the purpose of this book becomes clear--to use his life as propaganda try to do away with the stigma of non-monogamous casual sex and bad choices.
If you're looking for great sex stories they aren't here. Maybe two that are somewhat descriptive but seem like they're teen fiction. The writer obviously doesn't understand the important of pronouns since he mixes them up for himself and others--at times using "you" to mean him and other times "you" to be the first-person narrative of someone else. The only thing I admire about the book is that it is the rare modern book that properly doesn't capitalize "black." That doesn't mean the book is not offensive in other ways--it often uses the terms "blackboys" and "whiteboys" as well as versions of the n-word. I guess it's supposed to be edgy when a black guy writes offensively racist and stereotypical things?
And racist the book is. He makes it very clear that he finds it odd that black men would have sex with whites (including himself) and that whites love to have sex with blacks. Talk about taking the discussion back fifty years.
The author is pretty much a loser who gets fired from jobs, has intimacy issues, starts drinking so much that he has to start attending AA (blaming it on being "genetically predisposed" as so many do that don't want to accept personal responsibility for their choices) and is such a poor autobiographer that his biggest sections are on childhood spelling bees and being in the hospital. Both are yawn-inducing.
His purpose becomes clear when he ends the book saying that since his HIV+ is ruled undetectable he can again have sex with others. The lack of scientific logic in positive men is shocking and the fact that they condemn anyone who won't sleep with them due to their status shows how guilty they are being the intolerant ones. The author now lists his status on hookup profiles but not out of any sense of morality--"I wanted to present myself as a safe choice." HUH? Then he complains that he's "horrified and enraged by the number of white gay men who make it plain in the comments section that the stigma of being HIV positive is alive and well." Well, Mr. Stewart, it would help if you didn't brag about having a potentially deadly disease as making you safe than other guys--they are simply using their brains instead of their cocks.
This book is proof that just about anything will get published today if you're a certain type of person. But being a good writer with quality unique stories that relate to readers is obviously not one of the criteria, I am afraid.
How about comments like "dazzlingly propulsive" and "memorable portrait of black gay life." I defy anyone after reading this to recall much of anything beyond the fact that near the end the writer finds out he's HIV+ and suddenly the purpose of this book becomes clear--to use his life as propaganda try to do away with the stigma of non-monogamous casual sex and bad choices.
If you're looking for great sex stories they aren't here. Maybe two that are somewhat descriptive but seem like they're teen fiction. The writer obviously doesn't understand the important of pronouns since he mixes them up for himself and others--at times using "you" to mean him and other times "you" to be the first-person narrative of someone else. The only thing I admire about the book is that it is the rare modern book that properly doesn't capitalize "black." That doesn't mean the book is not offensive in other ways--it often uses the terms "blackboys" and "whiteboys" as well as versions of the n-word. I guess it's supposed to be edgy when a black guy writes offensively racist and stereotypical things?
And racist the book is. He makes it very clear that he finds it odd that black men would have sex with whites (including himself) and that whites love to have sex with blacks. Talk about taking the discussion back fifty years.
The author is pretty much a loser who gets fired from jobs, has intimacy issues, starts drinking so much that he has to start attending AA (blaming it on being "genetically predisposed" as so many do that don't want to accept personal responsibility for their choices) and is such a poor autobiographer that his biggest sections are on childhood spelling bees and being in the hospital. Both are yawn-inducing.
His purpose becomes clear when he ends the book saying that since his HIV+ is ruled undetectable he can again have sex with others. The lack of scientific logic in positive men is shocking and the fact that they condemn anyone who won't sleep with them due to their status shows how guilty they are being the intolerant ones. The author now lists his status on hookup profiles but not out of any sense of morality--"I wanted to present myself as a safe choice." HUH? Then he complains that he's "horrified and enraged by the number of white gay men who make it plain in the comments section that the stigma of being HIV positive is alive and well." Well, Mr. Stewart, it would help if you didn't brag about having a potentially deadly disease as making you safe than other guys--they are simply using their brains instead of their cocks.
This book is proof that just about anything will get published today if you're a certain type of person. But being a good writer with quality unique stories that relate to readers is obviously not one of the criteria, I am afraid.
February 6, 2024
This is one of the most beautiful, creative, distinct, and profound memoirs I've ever read. Highly recommend. While packing so much in, it moves very quickly, and the writing is beyond beautiful. It will have particular appeal to folks from the South (much of it takes place in Knoxville, Tenn), but anyone who's ever stumbled through their 20s, or struggled to balance making a living with relationships and feeding one's artistic drive, and/or felt like the odd man out will relate. Reading it reminds me of my own artistic ambitions and, at the same time, makes me excited for Darius Stewart's next book.
July 14, 2024
Mesmerizing style and soulful storytelling
Although my life is so very different from Darius’, I was drawn to his magical poetic storytelling, his outstanding memory of events and most importantly his perceptiveness. His ability to remember incidents and interpret them is so remarkable.
Although my life is so very different from Darius’, I was drawn to his magical poetic storytelling, his outstanding memory of events and most importantly his perceptiveness. His ability to remember incidents and interpret them is so remarkable.
August 21, 2024
Am I back in my memoir phase? Such a quick read bc it’s so good. It’s heartbreaking, beautiful, and endearing all at the same time.
October 29, 2024
Brutally honest and moving in its vulnerability and defiance.
May 7, 2025
This is not something I'd usually pick, but something about it pulled me in. I couldn't relate to the author's life, but it was still compelling. Excellent read.
October 5, 2025
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 37TH Lambda Literary Awards for Gay Memoir.
Real Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: From an exhilarating new voice, a breathtaking memoir about gay desire, Blackness, and growing up.
Darius Stewart spent his childhood in the Lonsdale projects of Knoxville, where he grew up navigating school, friendship, and his own family life in a context that often felt perilous. As we learn about his life in Tennessee—and eventually in Texas and Iowa, where he studies to become a poet—he details the obstacles to his most crucial hiding his earliest attraction to boys in his neighborhood, predatory stalkers, doomed affairs, his struggles with alcohol addiction, and his eventual diagnosis with HIV.
Through a mix of straightforward memoir, brilliantly surreal reveries, and moments of startling imagery and insight, Stewart’s explorations of love, illness, chemical dependency, desire, family, joy, shame, loneliness, and beauty coalesce into a wrenching, musical whole. A lyrical narrative reminiscent of Saeed Jones’s How We Fight for Our Lives and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Be Not Afraid of My Body stands as a compelling testament to growing up Black and gay in America, and to the drive in all of us to collect the fragments of our own experience and transform them into a story that does justice to all the multitudes we contain.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.
My Review: Honesty, the true and fully realized kind, is often not kind to the subject or the teller. Author Stewart is fully honest in this memoir of Black male gayness.
The light it shines on himself, and Black culture’s fraught relationship with masculinity, queerness of all sorts, and what we seem unable to stop calling "race" despite the term’s horrifying baggage and unscientific pallor, is unsparing. It does no one any flattering favors to be seen in a searchlight’s beam. What Author Stewart set out to accomplish, so it seemed to me, was to make the cost of Othering...to the Othered as well as those who do the othering...personally real. Memoir only accomplishes that when it is honest and not self-serving.
The honesty about his sexual nature is both refreshing and difficult to read. The author’s Blackness was a lure and a weapon in his sexual arsenal. He details his encounters with white men who fetishized his skin color and their perceptions of who and what that meant he was. He does not fail to address the reciprocal fetishization, and honestly, so it did not come across in the reading as a scolding or a condemnation. His great anxitey about being perceived by others as effeminate, which is perceived as unforgivable in hypermasculinized Black culture, informs his sexual behavior. Being penetrated is the Ultimate Awful Sin against masculinity in US culture in general. Being penetrated by white men is the Ultimate Taboo for Black gay men. So, of course, what could possibly be more thrilling and desirable?
It should be to no one’s pearl-clutching amazement that young Darius Stewart found himself in the demimonde of social and sexual transgressors; and that he began to address the pain and self-image issues of being Other among those culturally Othered with self-medication aka drug and alcohol abuse. As is so often the case, this came with the risky sexual behavior that, in the 1990s, was almost certain to result in HIV infection. It does for Author Stewart, and while he is of the generation where HIV infection is a treatable, manageable condition and not a death sentence, it still had..and has...consequences that are unpleasant to cope with.
No part of Author Stewart’s journey was spared in his remembering eyes. He is unflinching in telling us how horrified he was to realize his undeniable gayness would not go away no matter how hard his childhood self prayed for it to. He could not pass as straight no matter how hard his teen self tried to. He was always, irreducibly, himself.
It takes a long time for that realization to become okay. More especially when even the Others your skin color places you among then Other you for your essential self, and heap hatred and abuse on you for this other Othering. It feels like no small miracle that Author Stewart chose to survive instead of taking the high-speed exit of suicide.
A deep self-reckoning like this book is, is a rare reading pleasure. I encourage all y’all not to miss this one.
Real Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: From an exhilarating new voice, a breathtaking memoir about gay desire, Blackness, and growing up.
Darius Stewart spent his childhood in the Lonsdale projects of Knoxville, where he grew up navigating school, friendship, and his own family life in a context that often felt perilous. As we learn about his life in Tennessee—and eventually in Texas and Iowa, where he studies to become a poet—he details the obstacles to his most crucial hiding his earliest attraction to boys in his neighborhood, predatory stalkers, doomed affairs, his struggles with alcohol addiction, and his eventual diagnosis with HIV.
Through a mix of straightforward memoir, brilliantly surreal reveries, and moments of startling imagery and insight, Stewart’s explorations of love, illness, chemical dependency, desire, family, joy, shame, loneliness, and beauty coalesce into a wrenching, musical whole. A lyrical narrative reminiscent of Saeed Jones’s How We Fight for Our Lives and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Be Not Afraid of My Body stands as a compelling testament to growing up Black and gay in America, and to the drive in all of us to collect the fragments of our own experience and transform them into a story that does justice to all the multitudes we contain.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.
My Review: Honesty, the true and fully realized kind, is often not kind to the subject or the teller. Author Stewart is fully honest in this memoir of Black male gayness.
The light it shines on himself, and Black culture’s fraught relationship with masculinity, queerness of all sorts, and what we seem unable to stop calling "race" despite the term’s horrifying baggage and unscientific pallor, is unsparing. It does no one any flattering favors to be seen in a searchlight’s beam. What Author Stewart set out to accomplish, so it seemed to me, was to make the cost of Othering...to the Othered as well as those who do the othering...personally real. Memoir only accomplishes that when it is honest and not self-serving.
The honesty about his sexual nature is both refreshing and difficult to read. The author’s Blackness was a lure and a weapon in his sexual arsenal. He details his encounters with white men who fetishized his skin color and their perceptions of who and what that meant he was. He does not fail to address the reciprocal fetishization, and honestly, so it did not come across in the reading as a scolding or a condemnation. His great anxitey about being perceived by others as effeminate, which is perceived as unforgivable in hypermasculinized Black culture, informs his sexual behavior. Being penetrated is the Ultimate Awful Sin against masculinity in US culture in general. Being penetrated by white men is the Ultimate Taboo for Black gay men. So, of course, what could possibly be more thrilling and desirable?
It should be to no one’s pearl-clutching amazement that young Darius Stewart found himself in the demimonde of social and sexual transgressors; and that he began to address the pain and self-image issues of being Other among those culturally Othered with self-medication aka drug and alcohol abuse. As is so often the case, this came with the risky sexual behavior that, in the 1990s, was almost certain to result in HIV infection. It does for Author Stewart, and while he is of the generation where HIV infection is a treatable, manageable condition and not a death sentence, it still had..and has...consequences that are unpleasant to cope with.
No part of Author Stewart’s journey was spared in his remembering eyes. He is unflinching in telling us how horrified he was to realize his undeniable gayness would not go away no matter how hard his childhood self prayed for it to. He could not pass as straight no matter how hard his teen self tried to. He was always, irreducibly, himself.
It takes a long time for that realization to become okay. More especially when even the Others your skin color places you among then Other you for your essential self, and heap hatred and abuse on you for this other Othering. It feels like no small miracle that Author Stewart chose to survive instead of taking the high-speed exit of suicide.
A deep self-reckoning like this book is, is a rare reading pleasure. I encourage all y’all not to miss this one.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews