Boys come first, p.1
Boys Come First, page 1
Copyright © 2022 by Aaron Foley
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief
quotations in a book review.
Printed in the United States of America
First edition 2022
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-953368-37-9
Belt Publishing
5322 Fleet Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio 44105
www.beltpublishing.com
Cover art by David Wilson
Book design by Meredith Pangrace
Advance praise for
boys come first
“Uproarious, sharp, bruising, hip, and real. Aaron Foley’s Boys Come First moves along with a graceful self-assurance, spot-on characterizations, and a genuine assessment of the extraordinary yet mundane plight of Black queer men—how we must navigate the world, protect ourselves from violence and cruelties, construct our own safe spaces, and stitch together community from the strands of chosen family. This book is so brutally honest that it’s hard to believe it’s fiction.”
—Robert Jones Jr., author of The Prophets,
New York Times bestseller and 2021 National
Book Award finalist
“Imagine the thirtysomething angst of Insecure meeting the queer Black friendships of Noah’s Arc, intersecting with the dating dilemmas of Waiting to Exhale, all rolled up into the dynamics of a gentrified Detroit, and you’ve got Boys Come First. It’s a fun novel that will have you eager to turn every page to find out what’s coming next for Dominick, Troy, and Remy.”
—Frederick Smith, author of Down for Whatever
“It’s all fun and games with friends Remy, Dominick, and Troy until they
hit their thirties. As their fraught situationships and sexy entanglements start to reveal hard truths about themselves, the friends must deal with life’s hard questions. Foley has written a delicious romp about the game of love. But at its core, Boys Come First is a laugh out loud story about Foley’s first love—
the city of Detroit.”
—Desiree Cooper, Pulitzer Prize-nominated
journalist and author of Know the Mother
WINTER
Chapter One
I better not get my Black ass pulled over in hoe-ass, bitch-ass Pennsylvania, Dominick Gibson thought to himself for what must have been the fortieth time, speeding westward through the Keystone State in a rented Kia Soul that could barely maintain the eighty-fiveish miles-per-hour he’d been doing since he’d first merged onto I-80 coming out of Manhattan.
Although, getting pulled over in one of these dreary towns filled with Trump voters in whistle-stop diners and letting the officer, inevitably white and male, humiliate, beat, or haul Dominick off to jail—or maybe some combination of all of the above—would fit right in with the total shitstorm of events he’d endured over the last week and a half.
Just eleven days ago, Dominick had been enjoying monogamy and gainful employment in New York City. Now, in the darkest hours of this Pennsylvania night, neither existed. He’d had goals before everything had fallen apart: marriage by thirty-five, a kid one year after that, a vacation home by forty, and his own advertising firm by forty-five. But here he was now, thirty-three years old and with eight years with his ex, Justin, having led absolutely nowhere. Time was running out. Though when you’re Black, gay, and thirtysomething, time always feels like it’s running out.
The thirtysomething years are critical for gay men like Dominick because they have to have everything figured out by then if they don’t want to become walking stereotypes later. While Dominick was busy getting older, everyone else around him just kept getting younger. Whenever he took a lingering look in the mirror, it seemed his hairline had receded another millimeter. Meanwhile, a new crop of boys, all with healthy hair and more-elaborate-than-ever skincare routines, kept rolling off the assembly line.
Is everybody at the club twenty-two now? he thought. They google how to douche; we had to learn the hard way.
Those younger men were forbidden fruit, and they would chase guys like Dominick once he got to a certain age—that age when, if he reached it while he was still single, he would turn into the full-blown stereotype. Leering. Predatory. Old. The last thing Dominick wanted was to be someone’s daddy, a sixtysomething single man with a wrinkled chitterling dick and a hog maw butthole who thinks he’s forty years younger and creeps on anybody and everybody.
That’s the thing. If Black gay men don’t have their shit together in their thirties—the job, the apartment with more than one bedroom, and the boyfriend who’s about to become a fiancée and then a husband—then they’re still going to be figuring it all out in their forties and fifties when the crow’s feet start showing. And Dominick certainly did not want to be in the dating pool at forty when everyone else was twenty-two. He didn’t want to be struggling with his career at the same time either, so as he had worked hard to hold onto Justin, he had also made sure to keep climbing in the advertising world. Before it all fell apart, the two of them were planning to settle down with each other and their peak incomes and leave all the broken and broke fortysomethings behind.
Plans gone awry consumed Dominick’s thoughts as he sped through the rest of Pennsylvania and Ohio. He barely had enough gas to make it to his mother’s front door in Detroit. But despite his infrequent visits of late, he still remembered one thing about his hometown: do not stop for gas in the middle of the night. The low-fuel light gleamed in the dashboard as he pulled into his mother’s driveway, and he muttered a little prayer of thanks that he’d made it there without any issues. Though after almost ten hours in the car, intermittently talking to God, his best friend Troy, Siri, and an annoying woman from a collection agency, Dominick knew he would now have to talk to his mother, Tonya Gibson, who was standing in the doorway at 3:38 a.m., wondering why her son had decided to drive all the way to Detroit from his apartment in Hell’s Kitchen on a Thursday.
A half-hour later, after a quick, evasive chat and an excuse that he had a headache and just needed to sleep, Dominick lay on the full-size bed in his teenage room, his back already aching from the lumpy Art Van mattress his mother hadn’t replaced in fifteen years.
He was a gay man, a Black gay man, with a setback and without explanation.
White gay men are afforded things Black gay men aren’t. No judgment for dating a decade-plus younger, no slut-shaming, and above all, no worrying about what their families might say when something like this happened. The this, in Dominick’s case, was losing his job in a profession his parents had never wanted for him in the first place.
Working in advertising was rebellious. In Detroit, Dominick’s parents were, until their divorce, one of the city’s power couples—his father was an oncologist and his mother an anesthesiologist. They had met in very Detroit fashion, as high school students on the dance floor of The Scene, a televised dance program broadcast by the city’s only Black-owned station. Back then, Tonya had plans to go to Wayne State, but instead, she had followed Craig to Howard on the condition that they would stay together and come back to Detroit to start a family. They did. And after thousands of dollars for private school for their little one—Waldorf for elementary and middle, then University of Detroit Jesuit after that—they expected Dom would find his way along a similar path. He’d go to Howard and pledge Kappa Alpha Psi just like his father, and he’d marry a Delta Sigma Theta who was just like his mom. Nobody seemed to notice that while all these plans were taking shape, Dominick was actually making short movies and fake commercials with his friends. Nobody noticed that instead of spending nights reading a gifted copy—Christmas, 1998—of Gray’s Anatomy, Dom was devouring Nick at Nite reruns, old movies on AMC, and, if he tuned his antenna just right, British soaps on the CBC affiliate across the river in Windsor. And almost certainly no one noticed that marriage to a woman wasn’t in the cards, but that was only because his mother and father were so preoccupied with Dominick choosing advertising as his major instead of premed.
Turns out, coming out as a doctor’s son who’s uninterested in medicine and more interested in pop culture was harder than coming out as gay. (Although, to be fair, Dom’s interest in pop culture was practically forced on him in utero. Probably a third of Black kids born in the mid-1980s were named after Dynasty characters like Krystle, Fallon, Alexis, or, especially, Dominique, the name Tonya had had her heart set on until she found out she was having a boy.) Dominick made his big announcement during winter break of his freshman year—this was when he for sure, for sure knew he was gay after his first maybe, maybe not boyfriend in Detroit and five and a half intense lovemaking sessions with a would-be Alpha at Howard who dropped line out of fear of being outed. Both Tonya and Craig were unfazed, telling Dom it was about time he told them. They did wonder, though: Were you ever going to think about switching your major?
He didn’t. He kept with advertising, getting a copywriting job immediately after graduation. He became quite good at it, too, starting in DC and moving to Manhattan three years after that. He felt as long as he was on track to be married by thirty-five and have a kid shortly after, he’d never have to explain himself to his parents again.
But everything was not on track. And if he had taken the time to explain everything to Tonya as it had really happened, it only would have solidified al l her long-held worries about the instability of an artistic career.
It had gone something like this:
On December 11, Atomic Ranch, a chic, millennial-targeting marketing agency where Dominick had been working after being plucked away from Tandy and Simms, the multinational giant that had made him an Ad Age-certified rising star on the East Coast, folded. Atomic Ranch had been founded on the idea of creating snappy video content that would connect stodgy brands with young readers who were now flocking to Vice, Vox, and BuzzFeed. When Tom Boyle, T&S’s global creative director, cobbled together nearly $10 million in investor funds to fly the coop and put down Atomic Ranch’s roots in a $5,000-a-month coworking space in Cobble Hill, Dominick was his first hire. He became creative director—no small feat for a Black man in advertising, since there were so few to begin with.
It turns out that in the startup world, $10 million dissipates pretty quickly. So too do the tastes of young readers. And when the digital media darlings all announced dips in readerships and a pivot back to original content after pivoting to video, Atomic Ranch crumbled. Fast.
In the dark of his mother’s house, Dominick tried to remember if he’d packed the USB drive that had his most current resume and his best writing clips on it. He’d certainly need them for his job search in . . . wherever his job search was going to be.
Do I pick up where I left off here in Detroit? Do I keep going west? LA? San Francisco? Maybe Singapore needs copywriters? Literally anywhere but New York, he thought. But restarting in Detroit seemed like the likeliest outcome, even if Dominick was hesitant about it. Here, I could at least maybe still get my career back on track by thirty-five.
He couldn’t stop thinking about how Tom had pulled him aside to tell him Atomic Ranch was over.
“Vox isn’t renewing. BuzzFeed isn’t renewing. Bustle is done. All of Gizmodo is done. And Slate, oh my God, goddamn Slate—they fill you up with promises and lead you on to absolutely fucking nowhere and then just piss the bed in the end. Unless a fucking miracle happens, we’re finished.”
Dominick had been talking almost all his life, starting with his first word, “apricots,” at eight months old in his highchair. But now, he was speechless.
“Do you understand what’s going on, Dom?” Tom asked. “We have to shut it all down.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“I’m sorry, but don’t . . .”
“Don’t what? After all the shit I’ve put up with in this motherfucker, this is how it’s going to go down? For real? I’m the one that has to go?”
“We all have to go!”
“Muhfucka, I put my entire career on the line for you!”
Despite Atomic Ranch’s be-your-best-true-self ethos, Dominick had hardly ever cursed in the office before, and he realized he had just said two different versions of the word “motherfucker” directly to his boss. And that second “motherfucker” was a “muhfucka.” Living in a hip Manhattan enclave with fellow NYC transplants and working in a mile-a-minute Brooklyn office had softened him. But now, with that “muhfucka,” his Detroit was showing.
By the time Dom could gather his thoughts, he was walking out the office’s front door with a box of his belongings. The HR rep, some permalancer temp, had asked Dom to sign some paperwork; Dom did it without reading a word. The quicker he could escape, the better. I probably should have saved my emails, he thought, but that concern had disappeared completely by the time he was halfway to the Jay Street/MetroTech subway stop.
Tom, red-faced and out of breath, followed him the whole way, stopping Dominick just as he was about to swipe his phone over the OMNY reader.
“I’m sorry, Dom. I’m so sorry,” he said.
Dominick briefly thought about dragging Tom through the turnstile and pushing him over the platform. He imagined the train wheels grinding over his boss’s flesh, blood splattering across the walls, crimson trails dripping toward the garbage on the tracks. Then he thought about what he would tell the transit officer—there were so many of them now compared to when he had first moved to the city—when they arrested him, and then later the judge and jury who would no doubt send him away for life.
He backed away from the turnstile to allow other passengers to pass, leaned against a MetroCard machine, and looked up at his now-former boss. He exhaled, making sure his words were as pointed and clear as any piece of copy he’d ever written.
“I’m sorry, too, Tom. I didn’t mean to say what I said. I just need to go.”
“Let’s talk about this later, OK? When you’re not so upset.”
“I’ve just been fired, Tom. What did you expect?”
“You weren’t fired. You’ve done amazing work for us. It’s not going to be the same without you.”
“Then why . . .”
Dominick caught himself and looked around the station. His face was hot, but even though his eyes were misty, no tears came. He looked at Tom and tried not to blink. Too much blinking would cause the tears to flow, and he didn’t want anyone to see him cry right now.
“I just need to go. If there’s anything I need from you, I’ll let you know.”
“OK,” Tom said. He slowly backed away from Dominick, turned, and headed up the stairs, disappearing back out to the streets of downtown Brooklyn.
That had been the first setback.
The second one happened thirty minutes later, when Dom trudged up four tedious flights to his and Justin’s well-decorated apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, inserted his key in the lock, and found the door was already open. Detroit had taught him to lock his doors everywhere he went, no matter if he was in the pockmarked hood or the picket-fenced suburbs. Justin had always been more lax about this, having grown up in suburban Columbus, and it was something Dom could never count on him to do. But lately, he hadn’t counted on Justin to do much of anything.
Dominick didn’t expect Justin to be home. Although he hadn’t expected to be laid off either, so perhaps he should have tempered his expectations. The unlocked door was a curiosity. So was the TV being on and the thick odor of marijuana in the air. But when Dom walked into the bedroom to find Justin butt naked, legs spread in the air, with a mysterious man balls deep inside him, it all started to make sense—that is, once Dom had another one of what he called his “little out-of-body experiences,” in which he temporarily dissociated and lost himself.
When he came to, the two men were rushing to clean themselves up and put on some semblance of clothing. In the moment, Dom found the only thing he could muster was a whispered prayer in his head.
Dear God, please don’t let me go crazy. Please don’t let me die, but please don’t let me kill both of them where they stand, either.
Nobody died. And as badly as Dominick wanted to grab the big Japanese chef’s knife from the Williams Sonoma block that Justin had insisted they buy (even though neither of them ever used that many knives), he resisted. Justin and the mysterious man didn’t bother explaining themselves. They just hurried out of the apartment half-naked while Dominick stood silently, trying not to hyperventilate.
In retrospect, nobody had ever asked him why he loved Justin. In heterosexual relationships, it’s undeniable when a man and a woman are in love. They say things at weddings about completion—“You complete me.” It suggests there’s something incomplete about both parties, doesn’t it? And it suggests love, the love that enables a person to strive and do better for the recipient of that love, can’t catalyze until the two are brought together.
When two gay Black men are in a relationship, though, the question isn’t about love. It’s about work. As in, “How do you make it work?” or “What works for you?” Two Black men together isn’t a relationship. It’s a strategic partnership.
Work is what drives the gay Black relationship because both parties are expected to already be complete upon meeting. It is not “How do you complete me?” It is “How do you advance me?” It is about work, because gay men do not have time to fill each other’s holes—the metaphorical holes that is. The Black gay man’s trajectory is always upward. There is never time to slow down. There is no room to fail. And they need partners who can more quickly take them to where they ultimately need to be.
