All Boys Aren't Blue

Content Warning: “Breaking Cycles of Violence” references sexual abuse as well as racist and anti-LGBTQ+ violence. “The Intersection of Blackness and LGBTQ+ Identity” references slavery and anti-LGBTQ+ bias.

Johnson’s primary purpose in writing this memoir was to help educate a younger generation and prepare them to identify and break out of cycles of violence related to oppression. Johnson writes in the Afterword that “if one person is helped by [Johnson’s] story, then it was all worth it” (173), indicating the importance of helping to break these cycles. Johnson specifically writes against cycles of racist and anti-queer violence—particularly violence against those at the intersection of Blackness and queerness. Although much of this violence is systemic and societal, it also operates on an individual level, internalized as self-hatred or other harmful beliefs and practices; for example, Johnson imagines that the cousin that abused them might have been abused himself. It is therefore important, Johnson suggests, that those who experience such violence do what they can to resist it.

Breaking these cycles of violence means giving a new generation the representation, language, and stories that Johnson lacked growing up. This in turn means sharing their entire story in all of its joy and shame, including the uncomfortable and intimate details. Representation is important to Johnson, although this isn’t the sole method of breaking cycles of violence. In fact, Johnson warns that representation can be used to illustrate “how far we’ve come” as a society (58), thus stopping real change from happening (Johnson cites the election of President Barack Obama, America’s first Black president, as an example). For Johnson’s memoir, going beyond symbolic representation means transgressing expected norms and talking frankly about the negative parts of growing up Black and queer, such as their sexual assault, isolation, and depression. These are parts of the experience that are often left out in favor of triumphant and optimistic success stories. Not coincidentally, these are the parts of the memoir that school boards often cite in efforts to censor it. Johnson intentionally includes these episodes and discusses them in great detail in an effort to illustrate how this violence comes into existence, ultimately in the hopes of preventing it.

On the other side, this also means including in frank detail the joy of understanding their sexuality and being sexual on their own terms. Johnson frequently notes that they lacked access to queer sexual education and stories about queer sexuality growing up. When they finally had consensual sex in college, they had little idea of how to go about it. For Johnson, lack of knowledge contributes to these cycles of violence. If they had known more about queer sex, Johnson reasons, they wouldn’t have had painful and uncomfortable first experiences with sex. Johnson’s coming of age shows that ignorance of these topics only perpetuates harm for queer people. Likewise, opening up about the dynamics of a Black family and what it meant to grow up queer in a Black family destigmatizes queerness within the Black community. It also exposes non-Black people to the inner workings of a Black family, something not often touched on in popular culture.