How did the city become such a prominent part of the book? Or is was it really, it was always like that?įoley: It was always like that. It's changing just as much as these three guys mostly due to gentrification and development. Saliby: There are three main characters in your book, but I almost felt the actual city of Detroit was this fourth main character. I just thought it was important to sort of touch on some of these things. So, writing about those intersectionalities is something that I didn't see a lot of, and I'm not trying to be the torchbearer here, you know, there are a lot of people, you know, doing this work or attempting to get this work out there. Like, you see, so what does that mean? You know, what kind of, you know, how does that affect how some of these characters, like the ones I write about, walk through life and being Black at the same time? You know, it's not all, you know, we're faced with all kinds of oppression and prejudice and things like that which is something else I tried to touch on. I think for millennial gay man, for like the ones in the middle, here, we're kind of in that point where it's just like, okay, we're not quite the activists, but we're not also, you know, at that point where we could have come out when we were like 13, 14, 15. A lot of people older than us, you know, a lot of their coming out is rooted in activism and survival. You know, a lot of younger generations come out a lot earlier. Especially for millennial gay men, you know, there was a time where it wasn't always safe to come out. I was thinking that like, okay, you know, there's something to be said about the intersectionality of race and sexuality here, in terms of, we walk a different path than that, you know, 18-year-old kid who's just come out. And that's only one particular facet of queer life, and that's even before you get into like, trans representation, lesbian representation and so on and so forth. Can you speak more on how you decided to tackle this issue in the book? And I'm gonna say for listeners, you don't hold back talking about love and sex with these characters.įoley: It's something that a lot of my friends and I talk about amongst ourselves, in terms of not seeing that representation, and a lot of queer media, TV, film and books are kind of focused on that young adult, teenage, often very white love story. The characters in your book, like, talk about this, just as we're talking about this, how there's not really these types of love stories, and there's not that many Black gay couples in popular culture to look up to. Many of them, I think, center on young, white gay men who are just coming out. Saliby: On that note, I'm thinking about the types of love stories we see about people in the gay community. But by and large, a lot of queer fiction does not always center that voice, and I just wanted to do my small part to contribute to that. Lynn Harris and Bryan Washington and so on and so forth that have written about Black gay men.
I mean, there are some great novelists like E. You're right."īut then also, because the story is about gay Black men, there's not a lot of fiction at all that sort of deals with that.
He said, "It would be a lot more difficult for you as a man to write from the point of view of a woman." And I was like, "Yeah. Why did you decide to make that change?įoley: A very good friend of mine made that suggestion. Saliby: I saw that you originally planned to make the story about three women instead of gay men.
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I just had to go ahead and do it.īut when I became an adult and realized that you can't, only a lucky few get to write full time, and you have to have some other kind of career to support yourself. I went into journalism, but then I always had that fiction bug sort of still biting at me.
When I was a little kid, I used to write short stories and things like that, and I had big dreams of being a novelist. What made you decide to dip into fiction?įoley: It's something I've always wanted to do. Thank you for joining me.Īaron Foley: Thanks for having me. He’s written and edited two guidebooks about Detroit as well. Sophia Saliby: The new novel Boys Come First by Aaron Foley follows three gay Black men trying to navigate their thirties, hookups and career struggles amid a changing city of Detroit.įoley is also a Senior Editor with PBS NewsHour.
What does it mean to walk through a life in Detroit? But I didn't want to like dwell on that though. And I wanted to do something where it's just like okay, this is a city that's gone through a lot, yes. People still have lives, love, romance, career ambitions, dreams, all of that. It's almost a genre where you cannot write about Detroit without writing about the destruction and the devastation and things like that.