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I think they’re signs of rebellion.”īelow, Newson discusses information overload, sex positivity in stories of the AIDS epidemic, and what he’s working on next. “The truth is those things continue, no matter what we’re going through, and I don’t think they’re frivolous. “I think a lot of times when we do works of art about the AIDS epidemic, you would assume that no one laughed, you would assume that no one found any joy, that no one had any hot sex,” Newson says.

The AIDS crisis serves as the backdrop for My Government Means to Kill Me, but Newson isn’t interested in telling a story about the gay community’s pain although the novel doesn’t shy away from harsh realities, it devotes more time to the joy Trey finds in New York. to the concept of nonviolent protest - and finds himself thrust into activist circles. It’s there that Trey strikes up a friendship with Bayard Rustin - the real-life activist and organizer who introduced Martin Luther King, Jr. In the summer of 1985, Trey casts both his six-figure inheritance and his college plans aside to pursue a Bohemian life in New York City, where he joins “a hidden society of Black sodomites” - namely, the Black gay men who gather at Harlem’s Mt. Newson’s debut novel follows Trey, a young, gay Black man from Indianapolis.

“If you took some of my personality traits and put them in a character, what would that look like?” In writing My Government Means to Kill Me, he got to find out. It began as a thought experiment: “I’m Black and I’m gay, so I’ve spent my whole life wondering what I would have done had I been born during the civil rights movement, or what I would have done had I been 10 or 15 years older during the height of the AIDS crisis,” Rasheed Newson, the co-showrunner of Bel Air, tells Bustle.