My Government Means to Kill Me by Rasheed Newson

Rasheed’s writing career began when he partnered up with T.J. He has an ID badge from every studio lot. He worked as a production assistant an executive assistant an assistant to a showrunner and the second assistant to a network president. In 2002, Rasheed moved to Los Angeles and joined the entertainment industry. For five years, he volunteered with friends as a tutor/playmate at Grandma’s House, a group home for foster care children who were HIV+ or living with AIDS. During his time in Washington, D.C., he also worked in the communication and media departments for several non-profit organizations, including the Coalition for Juvenile Justice. Rasheed is a graduate of Georgetown University, where he wrote movie reviews for the school newspaper, The Hoya. Rasheed once spent several hours sitting in a coffee shop because he’d heard rumors that gay people frequented the coffee shop.

No mean feat in Indiana in the mid-1990’s. While attending a Jesuit high school, Rasheed realized that he was definitely a homosexual, and he immediately aimed to become a practicing homosexual. It was years before Rasheed had the courage to consider himself a writer. Nikki Giovanni and Kurt Vonnegut were among his favorite writers. He showed an early interest in reading poetry and fiction.

Rasheed grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, and is the eldest of three children. Vibrant, humorous, and fraught with entanglements, Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me is an exhilarating, fast-paced coming-of-age story that lends itself to a larger discussion about what it means for a young gay Black man in the mid-1980s to come to terms with his role in the midst of a political and social reckoning. Along the way Trey attempts to navigate past traumas and searches for ways to maintain familial relationships-all while seeking the meaning of life amid so much death. He volunteers at a renegade home hospice for AIDS patients, and after being put to the test by gay rights activists, becomes a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). In the city, Trey meets up with a cast of characters that changes his life forever. A fierce and riveting queer coming-of-age story following the personal and political awakening of a young gay Black man in 1980s New York City, from the television drama writer and producer of The Chi, Narcos, and Bel-Air.īorn into a wealthy Black Indianapolis family, Earl “Trey” Singleton III leaves his overbearing parents and their expectations behind by running away to New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket.

My Government Means to Kill Me by Rasheed Newson