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Five years following the release of his memoir “Black Enough, Man Enough: Embracing My Mixed Race and Sexual Fluidity,” Virgil’s Gullah Kitchen and Bar co-owner Gee Smalls released the self-narrated audiobook version for Pride month and Juneteenth.
Smalls’ memoir began as a joint endeavor with his husband, Juan, when they went to a writing coach to explore creating a book together. While Juan didn’t resonate with the writing, Smalls said he couldn’t stop after being given a prompt to briefly write about his background.
“I just couldn’t stop writing and realized how much I had been through and how much I was still going through, how many things I didn’t heal [from],” he told Georgia Voice. “So I just kept writing.”
The book spans Smalls’ entire life, starting with his Gullah Geechee roots in Charleston (which informs the menu at Virgil’s Gullah Kitchen on Marietta Street in Atlanta) as the child of a Black father and white mother, whose family disowned her after having a Black child. Throughout his childhood as an effeminate mixed-race boy, Smalls said he felt like an outsider while his peers attacked him with racial and homophobic slurs.
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“[The book is] about that struggle and how I identified growing up in a Black neighborhood and being rejected by the white side of my family, and what it was like becoming comfortable being mixed race,” Smalls said.
“Black Enough, Man Enough” continues through his adulthood, after he marries and has a child with his high school sweetheart, and spends time in the “shadows of the down-low” before getting divorced. The book also explores the full extent of Smalls’ sexuality and eventually becoming a vocal advocate for racial and LGBTQ+ equality.
While Smalls did not intend to release the audiobook in time for Pride and Juneteenth, he said that his story about finding the freedom to be oneself is timely, amidst June’s celebrations as well as the political turmoil BIPOC LGBTQ+ people are facing across the country right now.
“We have a man in office who is currently trying to erase [us] by taking away our rights,” Smalls said. “So, I think it’s time for us to speak even louder.”
“Black Enough, Man Enough: Embracing My Mixed Race and Sexual Fluidity” is available in print and audio through Amazon.
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