Hes also author of prelude to cruise which is winner of the penn joyce author award for poetry and at the 2015 stonewall literature award. Poetry collection is also a finalist for the 2015 National Book critics circle award as well as awards lambda literary and the publishing triangle in 2015. Saeed jones served as cohost of buzzfeeds morning show and served as buzzfeeds lgbt and culture editor. He grew up in lewisville texas and earned a ba at Western Kentucky University and an mfa at Rutgers University in newark. He lives in new york city and tweets at the ferocity. Thank you for being here saeed jones. As a side note, the southern festival of books remains completely free because of Strong Community support and we want to keep it that way. So you can donate on the web. Humanities tennessee. Org or by the southern festival of books or by the collection plate thats been passed around. Saeed is going to read for us. We will have a q a and when we get to the q and aplease use the microphone in the corner. Ill remind you. Then we will open it up for questions. So saeed, take it away. Thank you for being here. Thank you National Area this is just a real joy and im excited to share my story with you. Im going to read what i call the sex drugs and rock nroll chapter of the book. And so what you need to know is the book is basically in for and we will talk about the journey that gets us to this point but im going to read a section that is in some ways the soul of the book and its the reason why the book is called out we fight for our lives and not how i fought for my life as this is about me as is itis about you. I went to school in Western Kentucky University. This is winter break and i am partying with some asu friends in phoenix arizona and at the time i had dreadlocks that were long enough that when i put on my shirt i could not sit down. I cut them off as soon as i got into school. Okay. Chapter 15. December 30, 31st , 2007, phoenix arizona. A joke i used to repeat in those days was wife that the happy when you could be interesting. I knew howto be interesting. There waspower in being a spectacle , even a miserable spectacle. The punch and the line. Interesting. Sentences like serrated blades, laughter like machinegun rounds. A drink in one hand,a borrowed cigarette in the other. If you could draw enough glances, any room that orbits around you. That new years eve i wound up at a party that was exactly like every party i had ever been to and i hooked up to a pair of speakers and after a costume theme ive tried and failed to adhere to in an apartment with white people. The only difference is i was getting wasted in phoenix arizona instead of Bowling Green kentucky. And in the few days i had been there i concluded that arizona was perhaps the whitest place i had ever visited. It was like stepping onto the surface of a very well lit moon. The parties theme was the future which is why more than half the people in attendance were wearing some combination of synthetic fabric, aluminum foil and sunglasses. I had known that there would be in the only other shirt i had was a blue calico buttondown i put my dreadlocks into 2 pigtails and kept telling everyone i was dorothy the one found this in any way strange because of course this was the future. All bets are off as the year 2075 area over the last few years at College Parties just likethis one i had been an ice queen. I had been plato with a boy dressed as aristotle in tow, i had been a hot pink ncgligce all nuns where under their robes. I had been dorothy fromkansas. Poppy flowers woven into my dreadlocks. Maybe a theme like the future was supposed to get us the wonder sorry i what the future would look like. But i couldnt find it in myself. And instead, i can wonder was whether there would be a future left for any of us. A black man running to become president of the United States of america and i was checking the news every morning, anxious. Half expecting to read that he has anassassinated. Lately, i have been calling home less. I hadnt even told my mom i was going to be in phoenix for the holiday. A professor who had known me i was a freshman confronted me in her office just before the fall semesterand. What happened to you, saeed is i stared blankly, then remember this was the part where i was supposed to drive i cried. This was a future i would have to figure out onmy own. But i didnt want to think about it. These are one more night, i wanted to dance at a huge messy party and get blackout drunk. In this particular version of the future i was one of three game and at the party and the other two were dating each other. And theyre still dating each other, its very annoying. I think theyre even married. Anyway. But i was would find a way. I wanted to spend the night in one elses body. Or let someone else borrow mine. For the first few hours of the party, either i did not notice him or the man who would later tried to kill me simply had not arrived yet. All my eye was a terrific white black mess. I stopped, blake and sauntered in and out of the kitchen to refill my shot that i shouted orders about songs should be added to the party flames. Out on the porch smoking cigarettes and passing around a blunt, i stared at it for free of out of reach until i finally wipe off the fruit. It seems miraculous. Oranges in the dead of winter. Then i realized the unseen sight of the fruit was rotted. Ants pouring out of the ruling like a. Looking back, i could see how someone might see me that night and argue that i had it coming. I had a man like him coming. If that someone was america herself, i can understand how she might rattle off the warning, that black boy has been too hungry for too long. One of these nights, hes going to bite off morethan into. I will say for myself, america. I did the best with what iwas given. The man, lets call him daniel, looks familiar when i saw him from across the room. As if each part of an had been borrowed some other boy or man i had wanted. Leaning against that wall dispassionately sipping a beer he was the kind of quiet i have noticed in certain men and long hundred four. The silence of men who have it all and thus find it all boring. We dont exert the energy necessary to flirt, persuade or convince because they know america will come crawling to them on hands and knees. I realize now what i wanted was not just the bodies of such men but their power. And what they could use that power to do to the rest of us. The brutal exertion of will, destiny made manifest unspoken threat their muscles, bodies and white skin pose. I hungered for the power of the allamerican man. The marlboro man and the marlboro mans firstborn son, the high school quarterback, the companys future ceo, ernest hemingway. John wayne. Odysseus, hercules, achilles. The stone cut architect, beyond in everyman. The golden boy. The one. I cannot actually be the one myself, i thought i could survive by devouring him whole. The more straight, the more masculine, the more i wanted to see him with his legs spread or up, back arched in an orgasm that did not just bring him pleasure but a warning. In spite of the man you say you are, in the future i live in men like me are coming to conquer you and we will take no prisoners. This is what i thought it meant to be a man fighting for his life. If america was going to hate me for being black and gay thani might as well make a weapon out of myself. Thank you. [applause] just incredible, thank you. I mean, i cant even area i was going to reread that last line thats incredible. If america was going to hate me for being black and gay i might as well make a weapon out of myself. This reminds me of Ralph Ellisons invisible man in which the narrator otherwise known as invisible man describes bumping into people to violently remind him that he was there because they decided they dont like what he is and refuse to see him read when you talk about the trinity wichita fighting for your life inflicting pain on others . You see me struggling clearly with a lot in this book and this scene is when its all have to size over time into the bright black mess. One thing you dont see is i never was like do i like boys . I was like, done. It took a while for me to have a language. It took a while for me to be able to pick what was it like when 2 men are together after mark first fantasies i dream im a woman because i cant even visualize it. But i never once questioning that desire. I just remember being angry. Marriage equality time was fantasy. And i mentioned barack obama. It seemed as likely as a black man becoming president for Elizabeth Warren coming becoming president one day. I love her, i do but at the time it was like to be gay means youre never going to get married. Youre not going to have children, youre never going to be able to bring your loved ones to thanksgiving. Saying goodbye to all the thingsthats a good scenario. A few lonely and fake but far more likely , Matthew Shepard. This month is the 21st anniversary of the year was killed in laramie wyoming earlier he sees that same summer 1998, jane junior a black man in jasper texas which was four hours from where i grew up in lewisville texas was speaking and chained the back of a truck and dragged until his body literally came apart and im watching that as a 13yearold boy. And then later that year that october was Matthew Shepard so i was so scared and so angry that i think by the time i was a young man and you meet me in thischapter in the book , turned in to discuss. And i think at that point i was ambivalent about the value of my own life. One of the journeys of the book is like is saeed going to start fighting for his life and to fight for your life you haveto value your life. But at this point im just fighting and James Baldwin writes about a scene i think in a diner at one point where he just gets like Ralph Ellison just angry and he snaps and he quickly realizes i love my life and he runs out of the diner because he says i could get killed and i just welcomed the death sentence. And when my aunt, i sent the book to her earlier this year, she called me and we talked for two hours or so and something she said about that chapter, she started crying and worked her way up because she had a lot of questions so she worked her way up to this chapter and she said i think it was a suicide attempt. I think you weretrying to kill yourself. And she was so upset and i was like, that is exactly what it was. I have sent it out loud that was suicide by cop. It was like im so disgusted and frustrated. Im just going to run headon and through the terror because why not . And you know, ive always known that at least in this life like a masculine bro is just not in the cards for me. Write it off, let go. But that is does not mean i didnt have a violent approach to life. But unfortunately so many men do. So one of the products of the book i wanted to show the different ways that anger manifests because we all are fighting for our lives. But the thing about men, the thing about men is that when were fighting for our lives or or worse when we dont believe we are, where dangerous to everyone else around us really where just incredibly dangerous. We go down in a blaze of glory drive some people down with us. I always say that when men are like this. When we have got it figured out our gender politics to put it concisely, i think men like that are like a ford f2 50, i grew up in texas but a ford f2 50 with a drunk driver area speeding down the highway. Speeding down i 65. He is a danger not just to himself but to every other person on the road that is always happy shakes out so i had to figure this out to save my own life also in the process was just so clear that we are surrounded by daniel, some of us may be be daniel so we have to figure this out because all of our lives on the line area and i think along the same line, the memoir can a lot of scenes and passages about sexual racism which im surprised a number of people dont knowwhat that is. So what would you like to say about racism within the community. How is racism in the language of preference and how does internalized racism keep men from seeing their own beauty. If someone says something hurtful in the midst of sex and desire that is Important Information in your response to it is valid and deserves to be interpreted. Youre talking about the scene where you got colby and word spirit yes, at that point i would be out. Let me get my back and i got to go. As you see in the book theres a man i call the botanist. Im a College Student, man in his 30s and its not just a one night but what is more or less a relationship that goes on for several months. Come together, fall apart. Come together, fall apart. These dynamics are not linear. Very few of us are when we are in toxic relationships unfortunately its very rare that we have one terrible night, argument and then at the end, never to see that person again. Most of us are entangled and its difficult. Maybe we eventually, as i do, get away from that and get so disgusted that we step away but the truth is often we are wrapped up and its hard. The thing to think about sexual racism is that because our culture is still hetero normative, we are still getting people to understand that Women Deserve to be paid as much as men. That is literally still something we are fighting for. We are still right now the Supreme Court is trying to decide if it is fair for a person to be fired for being gay or transgender. 2019. 2019. We have not figured that out . If that is where we are in the nuanced conversation within our different committees and identities and how they men internalize misogyny is that not the most sexist massages thing ive ever heard have been said by gay men. Some of the most racist and almost all the racist things i have personally heard people say have been said by gay men. Its a complicated thing and if they talk about this on a cspan and risk furthering the worst stereotypes about gay men when we are still man we all do this. We all do this. Do i get up and talk about reproductive rights and risk complicating the way people see women and blight now be the spokesperson for everyone looks and lives like me. Thats complicated. We have to do the work because they dynamic is still ongoing. Something you see in the book that i really try to work with is a show that all these dynamics are still going on and you can talk about them or not but it is still going on. To go back to that trust analogy imagine that this is invisible. What do you do then . You cant even point at what happened and that is what it feels like. Yeah, its deeply painful and buried in summary ways and at one point in the book i had a friend who is Asian American and on that hook up app, to straight people know about grinder . [laughter] dont go on it now but yes anyway. He told me about being on grinder and looking at a guys profile in the profile and this is just my preference, its not racist but im attracted to this kind of person so why does her profile say no asian or latino cuisine . Why is that the way you describe people . Like i dont like asian food or mexican food and thats how is this a menu now . We are food on your menu . Thats horrible. I think sexual racism is totally connected to misogyny and totally connected again that just as a straight man thanks everything is fine, you are a mess. You are wearing us out. You know what i mean . I think a lot of gay men assume that because we have to do with homophobia, and we do, and because we been bullied or have to do with and we do that we are off the hook but no one is off the hook. That is key. This line got me, just as some cultures have 100 words for snow there should be 100 words in our language for all of the ways a black boy can lie awake at night. I feel like people forget that black boys get scared to and can you talk about the ways in which black boys are viewed as monoliths and how does your work keep on that . The reason i use that is because, you know, our language reflects our values. It shows the cumulative value system. If you live in a place with no you have lot of language to describe it because its a part of your reality and youve agreed upon that. In that line that is the night that we just watched the news report about james [inaudible] junior and i i tried to own in the book im in on reliable narrative and will not try to say that i remember everything perfectly. I remember the news but i dont remember if we had a heart and heart to talk. Then i went to my room and i was processing. My goodness, black girls, everyone, my god, to bully a black boy and, you know, to watch the way our country has talked about trade on margin to be 12 years old and to see what happens, think about what that does to you. Think about what that feels li like. To be that boys mother or father or sibling into be a black kid who is figuring out gender politics as my cousin in the my cousin who came out trans in the early 1990s and then they are being murdered and when Kamala Harris walks onto the stage and says my gender pronoun which is a nod to this generous not to this conversation and was it chris cuomo who says ha ha, [inaudible] but to see people we are supposed to trust and to give us information and to help us understand what is going on because so much is happening and to even make jokes of things that are very sensitive and painful for people especially for kids. It is just heartbreaking and we dont even have anguish for it. We dont. The fact that [inaudible] is such a perfect american example that these cops and 12 seconds, that tells you a lot. Twelve seconds. They saw a 12 yearold boy and assumed he was a man with a gun and shot him. Thats a lot of decisions to be making and 12 seconds but the fact that they saw him and thought he looked like a grown man, not that shooting a grown man wouldve been better but it says so much about our culture and you see black girls always getting suspended and they are disciplined more harshly because they are still kids. Talk about any white boys who walked into meme space, theater, church, and look at the langua language. He was just a boy and this is such a tragedy. Thats not a coincidence. Language and the language we consistently use is an opportunity for us to understand what we collectively have decided to value. If we dont have the language its not an accident. [applause] thats powerful. Another moment for you occurred during in chapter one which you say first of all, you are in the library and im a librarian as i said at the beginning so i love these library themes. Thank you. [inaudible conversations] this moment occurred in chapter one reset all the bo