Mentoring and Guidance

As he states in his Introduction, one of the author’s primary intentions in writing this book for young readers is to offer experience-based guidance and mentorship. He reiterates this point on a number of occasions throughout the book, restating his desire to save persons who grew up in similar outer circumstances, and with similar inner conflicts, from going through the same sort of difficulties that he went through. As he portrays them throughout the book, those circumstances and those conflicts were primarily defined by two key aspects of his identity. The first is his Blackness, while the second is his queerness.

The author also makes the point, however, that while his experiences and advice are both tied to those specific aspects of his identity, what he has to say is universal. He states on a number of occasions that the core truth of his experience...