In his memoir Punch Me Up to the Gods, Brian Broome chronicles growing up gay and Black in 1980s Ohio and how his search for love and belonging led him to Pittsburgh and beyond that city toward a Black literary lineage. He organizes the memoir around a single bus ride where he witnessed a Black toddler being schooled in masculinity by his father and everyone else, both Black and white, who boards the bus. Moving between the bus ride and his memories, Broome interrogates in detail the day-to-day mechanics of toxic masculinity and colorism, as well as, the often brutal ways by which Black children can be bruised at home, among peers, and in white-majority schools. Broome also turns the inquiry on himself, remembering his nights in gay bars and bathhouses and reconsidering the many risks he took and the ones he abandoned. Piercingly honest, this memoir defies the genre’s conventions: one chapter is written in the voice of Broome’s mother; another is told very closely from his perspective in middle school. This fluid point of view speaks so deeply to Broome’s breadth and scope as a writer and to this debut’s importance in LGBTQ literature today.
Punch Me Up to the Gods, by Brian Broome. Published by Mariner. The editor is Rakia Clark and the agent is Danielle Chiotti. Punch Me Up to the Gods is a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction; the winner will be announced on May 11.