My Black Book

Rating:
Summary: What 1 gay man thought of his interracial sexual encounters
Review: The book recalls (on the basis of the author's journals) sexual encounters with black men: twenty from 1978-80, another seven from 2002-03. The first set is a mix of relationships of some duration and "tricks;" the second set mostly portrays single encounters. The stories are sexually graphic. I would say that there are not "about sex," but about trying to understand some men, including the author, through sexual encounters (how they connected and disconnected in a more general sense than that of organs and orifices). The pleasures are most definitely "embodied," the regrets are mostly not about what the bodies did or did not do.

Adams celebrates the sexual connections across the American great divide of race that he made, varying in duration though the relationships were, during two particularly interesting epochs of modern American gay history, the pre-AIDS late-1970s and the post-everything years of the start of the third millennium.

Rating:
Summary: Erotic, well written and fun to read
Review: This extraordinary and engaging autobiographical book blends soulful sex with smooth and silky writing. I read it at one sitting. I was unable to put it down. This book is at once a coming-out story, a lyrical celebration of passionate sex with a variety of African American, and a stunning and fearless recital of reality that rings of truth. This is a story of an intensely sexually active mid-western white man, who comes to San Francisco, is liberated sexually, and proceeds to act without inhibition. Despite its direct and almost clinically detailed description of sexual acts over an extended period of time, this is not a sex book. It is a book in which sex between men is the key cement that binds relationships. It is also fun to read.

The book is organized in three sections: an introduction, a first book, and a second book. The first book covers the years 1978-1980 in the authors life, a period rich with sexual encounters with black men (20 are described, and the author stresses that this is a small subset of all the hundreds of men he has had sex with during this period). .... Ah, youth is indeed wasted on the young! But not Adams. He puts his formidable prowess to good use. Between 1980 and 2002 the author then takes a break to retire into relationships (details omitted), and emerges in the second book, which covers 2002-2003, sexually active again but this time in the gay bathhouse scene, older, more flexible, ...

This book is about sex, but it is not a sex book. Through the lens of sex, the author explores, candidly and honestly, the world of casual relationships, and specifically the world of black men who have sex with white men.

Adams has a Spartan way with words, but he sketches out characters and circumstances with remarkable style. There is Chaz, who lives across the hall in his apartment building, and crosses the corridor naked and aroused, in order to mount Adams while he is standing by the sink, "washing them greens good". Reading this piece, the thrill was palpable. A raunchy tenderness, fueled by lust.

These early stories are the sweet throwbacks to the period of the 1970s in San Francisco, when sex was a casual sport, to be engaged in for pleasure, comfort, or as a basis for getting to know someone new. Since such casual sex cuts across class lines, we get introduced to black men as human beings rather than socio-economic entities, with all the quirky touches of sex. There is Antonio, who cant wait to get to the baths where Adams is headed, and has him instead along the way, under the shadows of a freeway on-ramp. Some of these stories are turgid and erotic, others are sweet and sensuous, but each and every one is a good read. I greatly enjoyed Adams' spare prose style, and his detached retrospective approach.

Adams has the ring of an academic, as he analyses his own experiences with detachment. This book is strongly recommended as a "must read", for sophisticated readers.