Jesse flees from his family to London, where in order to survive, he becomes an in-demand rent boy, esteemed for his capable sexual skills (i.e. I'd look after ya." Now outed, the church "disfellowships" him.
He makes a flimsy pass at his friend Fraser, thinking he's gay, suggesting they run away and share a flat together: "I'd be like your girlfriend. Jesse develops into "the darling of the congregation," with talk of him entering the ministry. Later a friend will observe about him, "you're like a black boy trying to be a white boy trying to be a black boy," meaning learning what it means to be Black from white men.
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Starting as a young boy, with no Black male role models, he attempts to erase himself by using a Brillo pad on his skin with "the hot tap on until it ran scalding and set to scratching off the black, rubbed until the foam went pink." His mother resents Jesse because he reminds her of past failures. Gloria, Norman's daughter and Jesse's mother, had left his abusive father and married an older white man, Graham, converting to his Jehovah's Witness religion. Then the plot skips ahead to 2002, introducing us to Jesse McCarthy, a 20-year-old Black man, whom we will later discover is Norman's grandson. He muses, "We leave the Garden of Eden for the Land of Milk and Honey and find Sodom and Gomorrah." However, he's going blind and can no longer work, so his wife supports the family through two jobs. Norman started as a boxer but bad health, and limited options forced him to revert back to his horticultural skills, much prized by his clients. They came to fill labor shortages after World War II, hoping for a more prosperous future. The novel begins in 1956 with Norman Alonso, a gardener and Jamaican emigrant, who resides in Blixton, a coal town, part of the Black country, named after industrial pollution, but also for the first wave of the Windrush immigrant generation who journeyed from the Afro-Caribbean West Indies to Britain from 1948 to 1971. Both writers concentrate on the challenge of finding one's self while wrestling with a homophobic and racist society. It has received mostly raves from the UK press, transforming Mendez into one of their hottest authors.Ĭlearly Mendez is a bold remarkable talent, perhaps nearly matching that of his partner, the acclaimed almost-thirty-years-older British novelist Alan Hollinghurst ("The Swimming Pool Library," "The Line of Beauty"), making them potentially the Mary Shelley/Percy Shelley of English gay literature. It has been nominated for a Lambda literary award ("Lammy") as Best Gay Fiction and will likely win. The book was published last year and will be released as a paperback later this month. Raw and transcendent are the words applicable to Paul Mendez's semi-autobiographical debut novel "Rainbow Milk." A multi-generational dissection of sexuality, race, and religion on the rocky evolution of a young gay Black man, it is set in England from the late 1950s to the 2016 Brexit election.