Traitor to the Race, published by Dutton in 1995, explores homophobia and self-hatred through the story of a biracial gay couple’s reaction to a brutal street murder. At the center of the novel is Kenneth, an unemployed actor in New York City who fills his empty hours with elaborate fantasies—some of which are acted out with his soap opera star boyfriend, Evan. But the walls of Kenneth’s illusory world collapse with the gang rape and murder of his cousin and boyhood friend, and Kenneth is forced to confront his uneasy relationships with other African American men, and the fear and excitement of crossing boundaries of sex, power, race, and desire.
Review snippets:
“Scott writes with vigor and high imagination.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Beautiful, complex, intelligent and provocative.”
—Lambda Book Report
“An exemplary gay literary creation.”
—Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review
“Darieck Scott is a unique … voice whose formal inventions and crystal-clear prose never get in the way of such hard-to-talk-about psychological factors as self-hatred, guilt, and kinky sex. Scott writes masterfully of sex, murder, AIDS activism, and, most unprecedented of all, a sexually charged ritual-cum-demo that helps us look forward to another day.”
—Douglas Sadownick, author of Sacred Lips of the Bronx
“A sad, sweet soft-shoe toward loss of ethnicity—with a raging ritual of recovery as finale. Elegantly it choreographs sexual and racial tension.”
—Bruce Benderson, author of The Romanian: Story of an Obsession