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    The Essential Randy Boyd, Volume 1
    The Essential Randy Boyd, Volume 1
    The Essential Randy Boyd, Volume 1
    Ebook54 pages46 minutes

    The Essential Randy Boyd, Volume 1

    By Randy Boyd

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    About this ebook

    Race relations, living with HIV/AIDS, adolescent heartbreak, gay life, the healing power of dogs. Randy Boyd has written on these subjects and more on his blog, in numerous publications and in his four novels, which have been nominated for a total of five Lambda Literary Awards. Now, in one collection, revisit some of Randy's most essential writings in The Essential Randy Boyd, Volume One, featuring 10 stories, essays, blogposts and book excerpts from the black, gay, HIV-positive author.

    "Nowadays people need easily accessible reading options," says Boyd about his motivation for the collection. "I've a fantastical, 700-page, Harry-Potter-size opus ("Walt Loves the Bearcat"), three other novels, over 500 blogposts and a plethora of pieces published elsewhere, from Outsports.com to A&U Magazine. But I asked myself: what if someone only had the opportunity to read a sampling of my writing? Which of my works most define me and my experience here on Planet Earth?"

    The answer: The Essential Randy Boyd, featuring the following 10 stories:

    Battle scars: a young man's transformation from being overweight, in the closet and afraid of getting AIDS, to getting in shape, coming out to his family and taking the HIV test.

    Just like Magic: while the world reacted to Magic Johnson's famous HIV announcement in 1991, one black gay man already living with the virus reacted to the world's reaction in this essay published that same year.

    Dear Magic Johnson, thanks for saving life: giving credit where credit it due -- to Magic and Cookie Johnson for their decades-long work dealing with the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

    The day I died in 9th-grade gym class: the school's white quarterback makes an off-handed comment and a crushed, adolescent black boy is left to pick up the pieces.

    Sometimes I forget I'm a nigger: the Rodney King-related, Los Angeles riots of 1992 was a life changing-event for many Angelenos, including Randy, who wrote this piece for a magazine while the smoke was still smoldering.

    When the USC Sigma Chi's called me nigger: what happens when you survive childhood to escape to college in California, only to get there and be called "nigger" the week before school starts?

    Why pet the dog when in doubt: bittersweet childhood memory reinforces the healing power of pets. From Randy's blog series, "When in doubt, pet the dog."

    Update from the unlovable nigger faggot: that feeling you get when you realize most of your peers reject you for being black and gay ... and for living with HIV/AIDS.

    Listen up, Kunta Kinte Koleman!: while looking back at the racial history of America through word play, a black gay man has some advice for his slave ancestors from the past.

    Left for dead: the good, bad and ugly about surviving HIV/AIDS for 30+ years and counting, as detailed in an article in A&U Magazine.

    In addition to his novels, Randy's fiction has appeared in several anthologies, including Certain Voices, Flesh and the Word 2, Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS, Flashpoint: Gay Male Sexual Writing and Freedom in this Village: Black Gay Men’s Writing 1969 to the Present. His nonfiction has been featured in A&U Magazine, POZ Magazine, the Indiana Word, Frontiers, The Washington Blade, The James White Review, The Gay and Lesbian Review, The Lambda Book Report, BeyondChron.com and the anthology Friends and Lovers: Gay Men Write About the Families They Create.

    A 1985 graduate of UCLA, Randy has also been a contributor to Outsports.com and the publications of the Black AIDS Institute.

    Then there's his blog, Randy Boyd's Blocks, where Randy’s writings cover a diverse range of subjects, including gays in sports and cheerleading. A longterm survivor of HIV/AIDS, Randy blogs about the disease from his perspective in HIV-P.O.V., a subsection of his blog.

    So many writings, so little time. So where to start?

    The Essential Randy Boyd makes it simple.

    G

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandy Boyd
    Release dateNov 6, 2017
    ISBN9781931875257
    The Essential Randy Boyd, Volume 1
    Author

    Randy Boyd

    Randy Boyd’s four novels have been nominated for five Lambda Literary Awards. His writings cover a diverse range of subjects, including sports, politics, race, the gay community, HIV/AIDS, his dog, President Obama, and Trikke carving vehicles, much of it on his blog, Randy Boyd's Blocks. His fiction has appeared in Blackfire magazine, as well as the following anthologies: Certain Voices (Alyson Books); Flesh and the Word 2 (Plume); Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS (Other Countries); Flashpoint: Gay Male Sexual Writing (Masquerade Books), MA-KA: Diasporic Juks (Sister Vision); and Freedom in this Village: Black Gay Men's Writing 1969 to the Present (Carroll & Graf). His nonfiction has been featured in the Indiana Word, Frontiers Magazine, Au Courant, The Washington Blade, The James White Review, The Gay and Lesbian Review, The Lambda Book Report, BeyondChron.com and the anthology Friends and Lovers: Gay Men Write About the Families They Create (Dutton). Randy has also been a contributor to Outsports.com and the publications of the Black AIDS Institute.

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      Book preview

      The Essential Randy Boyd, Volume 1 - Randy Boyd

      The Essential Randy Boyd

      Volume 1

      Copyright © 2017 by Randy Boyd

      First ePub edition: November 2017 v1.0

      First paperback edition: November 2017

      Randy Boyd’s books

      Uprising

      Bridge Across the Ocean

      The Devil Inside

      Walt Loves the Bearcat

      Hostage (A Short Story)

      Ovulation Night (A Short Story)

      Randy Boyd’s blog

      randyboydsblocks.com

      1

      Battle scars

      Excerpt from the novel Bridge Across the Ocean

      I took off my T-shirt, tentatively at first, then marveled at how comfortable I felt standing on a beach wearing only a pair of blue shorts. Sometimes I had to remind myself I was no longer Tubby, as my brother used to call me. I sat on the sand and grabbed at the excess flesh on my midsection. It wasn't much—not nearly as much as there used to be—but I still longed for a tighter stomach. Using my shirt as a headrest, I lay back and sucked in my gut, feeling the light trace of stretch marks where love handles had once resided. Battle scars from my life, I told myself often. It was a victory, I guess: I lost the weight and with it, a lot of misery. I just wished I never had to wage the war in the first place.

      But I'd come a long way. A year ago this time, before getting tested, I was at literal rock bottom. I'd ballooned up to seventy pounds overweight, ate junk food and smoked pot like mad, constantly got into painful, unrequited romances with guys, many of them straight, was closeted to most of the people who mattered in my life, and still had casual, anonymous, marginally safe encounters that left me feeling empty and worried for my health.

      It was a hellish time in my life, the first years after college when I had little hope of knowing peace and happiness. I had come to UCLA and Los Angeles to escape my family and find myself. And to find the buddy I had wanted ever since age fourteen. College had come and gone, my youth was slipping, and I hadn't come close to having a boyfriend or feeling at peace with my sexuality.

      Emotionally though, I was growing, expressing my frustration to my journal every night and my therapist once a week. Then, on a warm fall evening almost a year ago, growth came in the form of a life-altering explosion. I was in my car in a parking lot, smoking pot alone as I often did, when I heard a song on the radio, I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man by Prince, a song about a woman whose husband left her with a baby and another one on the way. I started imagining the woman was my mother since she and my father had divorced when my brothers and sisters and I were young. I thought about how my mother had to raise five kids on paltry wages and a pathetic amount of child support. I thought about her working two jobs, sometimes three, and all the struggles she had with her husband who cheated on her and her children who fought her and each other. Growing up, I never knew whether to love or hate my mother, or whether she loved or hated me. She would erupt with bitter rage at an unmade bed, or say to me with such contempt: You look just like your father. Yet she was also supportive of all her children, never failing to show up for a school function or buy us whatever we wanted within reason.

      In the car that night, doped up, I listened to that song and pictured my mother with five babies crying out for love, each in their own way, and my father with a guitar in his arms, singing

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