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A debut book from Entertainment Weekly writer and former Out magazine editor Lester Fabian Brathwaite, Rage is a darkly comedic exploration of Blackness, queerness, and the American Dream, at a time when creative anger feels like the best response to inequality.
One romantic hopeful had greeted Lester Fabian Brathwaite on a dating app with this gem: “You into race play?” Being young, queer, gifted, and Black, Lester has found that his best tool for navigating American life is gallows humor. If you don’t laugh, you cry—or, you summon your inner rage. With biting wit, Lester’s book Rage interrogates all the ways that systemic racism and homophobia have shaped our society. All to pose that proverbial question: Can a gurl live?
Rage is one part memoir, one part cultural critique, one part live grenade. He contrasts his tragic-comedic love life with the ideals he had formed from bingeing (straight, white) Hollywood depictions. And he is quick to side-eye the misogyny and internalized homophobia that some people reveal in statements like “masc for masc” on dating profiles. Lester also dives deep into representations of queer life from RuPaul’s Drag Race to The Birdcage (Robin Williams was a snack in Versace), and explores our cultural understanding of Black genius through stories of James Baldwin, Whitney Houston, and Nina Simone.
Lester’s razor-sharp voice, coupled with his searing social commentary on topics such as dating, rejection, racism, sexuality, identity, and more, offer an increasingly divided world an engaging and original read.
Author: Lester Fabian Brathwaite
Hardback Published 8 October 2024 288 pages
"Recently a friend remarked, 'It is not enough for me to be Black. I have to know everything there is about being white.' He might well have said the same about being gay. Well, turnabout is overdue and in Rage you will discover that class in glorious, hysterical, heartbreaking session. Watch out! Here comes the truth."--Harvey Fierstein, actor, playwright, and New York Times bestselling author of I Was Better Last Night
"Wickedly genius and filled with canonical vengeance, Rage's viciously heart-open essays will leave you smirking in every waiting room--when they don't make you laugh so hard you wet your pants. Lester Fabian Braithwaite's debut collection is the insightful intellectual take on global expatriate queer Americana that the 21st-century needs." -Shayla Lawson, author of National Books Critics Circle Award Finalist This is Major and How to Live Free in a Dangerous World