Adarro Minton Author of Gay, Black, Crippled, Fat!
A writer— and, I believe, generally all persons— must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
-Jorge Luis Borges
This quote came to mind after having a conversation with Adarro Minton, the author of the short story collection Gay Black Crippled Fat. Minton has a lot of clay to work with. From seeing the death of Disco at the Paradise Garage to hard years in the grip of crack to living clean in upstate New York, Adarro’s life has provided him with a myriad of experiences, people, and places that find their way into these stories. In that sense these stories are true stories. In fact they are stories of people that you probably know or knew in another subjective lifetime. They are stories people who live next door or whose eyes you struggle to avoid while walking the streets late at night, holding secrets that you never guess could be as close as your own unspoken desires.
Adarro Minton’s work is a fresh look at life, not simply gay life or urban black life, but life experienced. His greatest strength lies in his ability to capture moments of beauty and crisis. He draws you in to the setting, be it White Plains or Queens or some unnamed forest in New Jersey. The often staccato style of writing gives every word and scene the precious sense of occurring in the here and now. You can feel the bitter early morning busstop winter cold biting your skin like it does the man-child Clyde in the introductory story or the hot-as-hell sweat covered fucking of a one night stand and the freshness of crossing the Brooklyn Bridge in the early morning hours. You can even taste the delicious moment of ecstasy that greets a crack head lighting up in a squalid apartment transformed in to a cathedral of heaven as the rock hits the brain.
I admit that when I looked at the title of the first story in this collection “Friends don’t let friends fuck fat girls or drag queens no matter how drunk they get” I was more than a little concerned that Gay Black Crippled Fat, would be a shallow romp of template ghetto stories. However, by the second paragraph those worries were dispelled. The variety of stories in this collection is surprising. The tales are written in a variety of styles and points of view which gives the world that Minton creates a certain kind of richness. He moves with few moments of awkwardness from the bus stops of Queens to the manicured lawns of suburbia.
Minton’s characters are perhaps one of this collection’s most memorable elements. They may at first glance be generic, but with some of the players in these stories he quickly builds history for them backgrounds and drives that lead them to the crossroads of choice. The tension ranges from the awkwardness of loose romance (“Friends don’t let friends”) and the monotony of suburban life (“A look at the base, vile, twisted deviant world of gay marriage”) to the self annihilation of hustles and tricks to grab the addicts holy host, the crack rock (“Crack story ‘99: You Understand”). However, when the stories end, many of them feel unresolved, the works of clay unfinished. It is as if Minton has decided to simply leave us at the crossroads and make up the rest of the stories ourselves. At times I found myself wishing that every tale was expanded for ten more pages.
Despite the number of vibrant personalities in these stories, such as Cherry, the smooth talking club kid with a gangster lean from “clyde of nyc” or the alzheimer’s inflicted grandmother of “Life with Doris,” some of the short stories focus on individuals who feel little more like cardboard cutouts. As with any collection there will be some works that are more powerful than others, yet in this work Minton seems to either delve deep in to the motivations of his character’s actions or simply devote a sentence or two and let the plot carry on. For example in “How Some Niggas Get AIDS” Mike displays a combination of bravado and cowardliness. He is sexually aggressive to the point of almost being abusive, and yet he seeks not to reap revenge on the person who harmed him, but rather he finds victory in spreading the illness as far and wide as possible. Minton sums up his motivation in just one line “someone had infected him. And he was not going down by himself.” This quick reasoning is one of the few sections that simply falls flat compared to the richness that marks the rest of the collection.
Yet even in its most hollow of moments the characters in Gay Black Crippled Fat are not merely stage props. Minton has put real people in these bodies, complete with scars, blemishes, moments of grace and clarity and hopes both simple and grand and perhaps most importantly the desire to love and be loved. The exploration of this last desire is perhaps the most profound in this collection. Perhaps the best example of this exploration of love in both the physical and metaphysical sense of the word is the multi part story “Three in Love.”
Minton’s stories are not simply tales of gay life or urban life but are true stories of life itself. Gay Black Crippled Fat is filled with the tragedies and hopes of everyday living, and that in itself makes it a remarkable book. Even though the work does fall victim of the unevenness that is inevitable in any short story collection, the quality of his writing, his ability to draw you in to his world, which incidentally is our own, is remarkable. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing what he will pull out next from the clay of life.
-Campbell Kennedy
A writer— and, I believe, generally all persons— must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
-Jorge Luis Borges
This quote came to mind after having a conversation with Adarro Minton, the author of the short story collection Gay Black Crippled Fat. Minton has a lot of clay to work with. From seeing the death of Disco at the Paradise Garage to hard years in the grip of crack to living clean in upstate New York, Adarro’s life has provided him with a myriad of experiences, people, and places that find their way into these stories. In that sense these stories are true stories. In fact they are stories of people that you probably know or knew in another subjective lifetime. They are stories people who live next door or whose eyes you struggle to avoid while walking the streets late at night, holding secrets that you never guess could be as close as your own unspoken desires.
Adarro Minton’s work is a fresh look at life, not simply gay life or urban black life, but life experienced. His greatest strength lies in his ability to capture moments of beauty and crisis. He draws you in to the setting, be it White Plains or Queens or some unnamed forest in New Jersey. The often staccato style of writing gives every word and scene the precious sense of occurring in the here and now. You can feel the bitter early morning busstop winter cold biting your skin like it does the man-child Clyde in the introductory story or the hot-as-hell sweat covered fucking of a one night stand and the freshness of crossing the Brooklyn Bridge in the early morning hours. You can even taste the delicious moment of ecstasy that greets a crack head lighting up in a squalid apartment transformed in to a cathedral of heaven as the rock hits the brain.
I admit that when I looked at the title of the first story in this collection “Friends don’t let friends fuck fat girls or drag queens no matter how drunk they get” I was more than a little concerned that Gay Black Crippled Fat, would be a shallow romp of template ghetto stories. However, by the second paragraph those worries were dispelled. The variety of stories in this collection is surprising. The tales are written in a variety of styles and points of view which gives the world that Minton creates a certain kind of richness. He moves with few moments of awkwardness from the bus stops of Queens to the manicured lawns of suburbia.
Minton’s characters are perhaps one of this collection’s most memorable elements. They may at first glance be generic, but with some of the players in these stories he quickly builds history for them backgrounds and drives that lead them to the crossroads of choice. The tension ranges from the awkwardness of loose romance (“Friends don’t let friends”) and the monotony of suburban life (“A look at the base, vile, twisted deviant world of gay marriage”) to the self annihilation of hustles and tricks to grab the addicts holy host, the crack rock (“Crack story ‘99: You Understand”). However, when the stories end, many of them feel unresolved, the works of clay unfinished. It is as if Minton has decided to simply leave us at the crossroads and make up the rest of the stories ourselves. At times I found myself wishing that every tale was expanded for ten more pages.
Despite the number of vibrant personalities in these stories, such as Cherry, the smooth talking club kid with a gangster lean from “clyde of nyc” or the alzheimer’s inflicted grandmother of “Life with Doris,” some of the short stories focus on individuals who feel little more like cardboard cutouts. As with any collection there will be some works that are more powerful than others, yet in this work Minton seems to either delve deep in to the motivations of his character’s actions or simply devote a sentence or two and let the plot carry on. For example in “How Some Niggas Get AIDS” Mike displays a combination of bravado and cowardliness. He is sexually aggressive to the point of almost being abusive, and yet he seeks not to reap revenge on the person who harmed him, but rather he finds victory in spreading the illness as far and wide as possible. Minton sums up his motivation in just one line “someone had infected him. And he was not going down by himself.” This quick reasoning is one of the few sections that simply falls flat compared to the richness that marks the rest of the collection.
Yet even in its most hollow of moments the characters in Gay Black Crippled Fat are not merely stage props. Minton has put real people in these bodies, complete with scars, blemishes, moments of grace and clarity and hopes both simple and grand and perhaps most importantly the desire to love and be loved. The exploration of this last desire is perhaps the most profound in this collection. Perhaps the best example of this exploration of love in both the physical and metaphysical sense of the word is the multi part story “Three in Love.”
Minton’s stories are not simply tales of gay life or urban life but are true stories of life itself. Gay Black Crippled Fat is filled with the tragedies and hopes of everyday living, and that in itself makes it a remarkable book. Even though the work does fall victim of the unevenness that is inevitable in any short story collection, the quality of his writing, his ability to draw you in to his world, which incidentally is our own, is remarkable. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing what he will pull out next from the clay of life.
-Campbell Kennedy
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