"Darius Stewart spent his childhood in the Lonsdale projects of Knoxville, where he grew up navigating school, friendship, and his own family life in a context that often felt perilous. As we learn about his life in Tennessee, Texas, and Iowa, he details the obstacles to his most crucial desires: hiding his earliest attraction to boys in his neighborhood, doomed affairs, his struggles with alcohol addiction, and his eventual diagnosis with HIV. A mix of memoir, surreal reveries, and startling imagery, Be Not Afraid of My Body is a compelling testament to growing up Black and gay in America, and to the drive in all of us to collect the fragments of experience and transform them into a story that captures all the multitudes we contain." -- Provided by publisher