ALSO BY ROXANE GAY

Nonfiction

Hunger

Bad Feminist
Not That Bad (editor)

Fiction

Difficult Women
An Untamed State
Ayiti

CORSAIR

First published in the United States in 2023 by HarperCollins

First published in the United Kingdom in 2023 by Corsair

Copyright © 2023, Roxane Gay

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-4721-5862-8

Corsair

An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company
www.hachette.co.uk

www.littlebrown.co.uk

For my mother, who first taught me that my opinions matter

He licked his lips. “Well, if you want my opinion—”
“I don’t,” she said. “I have my own.”

—Toni Morrison, Beloved

Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth
than plagues or earthquakes.

—Voltaire

Contents

Introduction

IDENTITY/POLITICS

Tragedy Plays on an Infinite Loop

Am I a Bad Person If Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie?

The Seduction of Safety, on Campus and Beyond

White Crime

The Case Against Hope

Cops Don’t Belong at Pride

Why People Are So Awful Online

Why I’ve Decided to Take My Podcast Off Spotify

It’s Time to Rage

Don’t Talk to Me About Civility
On Tuesday Morning, Those Children Were Alive

THE MATTER OF BLACK LIVES

Why I Can’t Forgive Dylann Roof

On the Death of Sandra Bland and Our Vulnerable Bodies

Of Lions and Men: Mourning Samuel DuBose
and Cecil the Lion

Where Are Black Children Safe?

Alton Sterling and When Black Lives Stop Mattering

How to Build a Monument

The World Expects Black Men to Make Themselves Smaller.
My Brother Never Did. . .

Making People Uncomfortable Can Get You Killed

CIVIC RESPONSIBILITIES

Who Gets to Be Angry?

Voting with My Head and Heart

Hate That Doesn’t Hide (on Trump’s Presidency)

No One Is Coming to Save Us from Trump’s Racism.

You’re Disillusioned. That’s Fine. Vote Anyway

Remember, No One Is Coming to Save Us

How We Save Ourselves

I Am Shattered but Ready to Fight

FOR THE CULTURE

So Fast, So Damn Furious

Nickel and Dimed (Mitchell Jackson’s The Residue Years)

Why the Beach Is a Bummer

Discomfort Zone (The Unspeakable by Meghan Daum)

Bridled Vows (Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation)

Food TV’s Sadistic Glee

The Marriage Plot

Warning Signs (The Sacrifice by Joyce Carol Oates)

Wise Crack (Delicious Foods by James Hannaham)

The Oscars and Hollywood’s Race Problem

Black Lives Imagined (Jodi Picoult’s Small Great Things)

I Don’t Want to Watch Slavery Fan Fiction

Mockingbird Reconsidered

Can I Enjoy Art but Denounce the Artist?

The Roseanne Reboot Is Funny.
I’m Not Going to Keep Watching

Roseanne Is Gone, but the Culture
That Gave Her a Show Isn’t

Insatiable Is Lazy, Insulting from Start to Finish

The Legacy of Toni Morrison

After Chadwick Boseman’s Iconic Black Panther,
Should King T’Challa Be Recast?

How to Collect Art

MAN PROBLEMS

Why Are Most Father’s Day Gifts So Terrible?

Nate Parker and the Limits of Empathy

Dear Men: It’s You Too

Louis C.K. and the Men Who Think Justice
Takes as Long as They Want It To

I Thought Men Might Do Better Than This

Dave Chappelle’s Brittle Ego

Jada Pinkett Smith Shouldn’t Have to Take a Joke.
Neither Should You

MINDING OTHER FOLKS’ BUSINESS

Madonna’s Spring Awakening

Charlie, Come In

Nicki Minaj, Always in Control

Melina Matsoukas’s Fearless Vision

Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuture

Sarah Paulson Has No Fear

The Talented Tessa Thompson

Where Jordan Casteel Sees Herself Going

This Is Pamela, Finally

SOLICITED ADVICE

Yes, Your Job Is Important. But It’s Not All Important

Ask Roxane: Is It Too Late to Follow My Dreams?

Ask Roxane: I’m Outraged but Failing at Activism. Why?

Ask Roxane: Where the Hell Is the Love of My Life?

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I have a lot of opinions and I come by them honestly. From an early age, I watched my mother confidently expressing her opinions with wit and intellect. She always stood her ground and was unapologetic about her beliefs. As someone who is relatively shy and quiet, I was impressed and I admired her greatly for her forthrightness. While I had opinions, I didn’t necessarily have the confidence to share them, so I wrote them down, usually for myself, and that was good enough. My mom didn’t necessarily know it at the time, but she consistently modeled what it means to have convictions and the confidence to express them. She still does. In my own work, I have aspired to do so, too.

Throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege of being able to share some of my opinions with a large audience. I built an ever-growing body of work one word at a time, writing on everything from contemporary fiction to police brutality to the Fast & Furious franchise. This book pulls together selections from a decade of opinion writing. It has been a decade of massive social upheaval. We continue to deal with a pandemic that reshaped our lives in many ways. This decade saw the rise of Donald Trump and his peculiar brand of ego-driven politics. We are drowning in misinformation. The battle for reproductive freedom has lost too much ground. The trans community is more imperiled than they were five years ago, as several states pass legislation that, essentially, outlaws everything from drag queen events to gender-affirming health care. This does not bode well for the rest of the LGBTQ community. Many states are experiencing a resurgence of book banning, and state legislatures are trying to dictate what is taught in schools and colleges and universities, trying to change history by ignoring it.

The climate into which I write my opinions is incredibly fraught but I write, nonetheless. I write to express outrage or bear witness or express admiration. I write knowing many people will disagree with me for one reason or another, sometimes reflexively. When I publish a new essay that’s provocative in some way, my father will reach out, in a concerned but also teasing manner, about how I’m making too many enemies. He worries that by virtue of expressing opinions, I am burning bridges. He’s probably right, though that is never my intention. And, frankly, any bridge my work might burn is not a bridge I have any interest in traversing.

The internet has long been an open-air bazaar for sharing opinions. And the ubiquity of those opinions is chaotic and intriguing and sometimes tiresome and overwhelming. There is a whole lot of noise and we probably know far too much about one another and what we think in this modern age. We can review almost any product from the point of purchase. On Amazon, some shoppers take their reviewing so seriously, you’d think they worked for Consumer Reports. What I’m saying is that our voluntary labor is rigorous. We can share our thoughts about a hotel, motel, or resort property. I am obsessed with TripAdvisor in particular, and consult it religiously when deciding where I want to lay my head in a given city. On that site, people discuss everything from the hotel restaurant to the quality of room service or housekeeping or the linens, to how polite or impolite the bellhops were during their stay. When reviewing higher-end hotels, people love to start by explaining that they regularly stay in luxury hotels, so we know they are very fancy. Yelp is a world unto itself; if someone has an exceptional meal or a bad meal and also has some disposable time, they can recount just how good or bad the meal was in exquisite or excruciating detail.

Entire Reddit forums are given over to people opining on anything and everything from relationship woes to old-school mommy bloggers. In one such Reddit community called “Am I the Asshole?,” users share a relationship conflagration and how they behaved and open themselves up to the judgment of the public. Nine times out of ten, the answer is, “Yes, YTA (you’re the asshole),” immediately followed by Redditors urging the original poster’s partner or relative to abandon said relationship forthwith. And, there is social media, where all of this happens in real time—an unending stream of everyone’s thoughts and feelings and desires and frustrations, great and small.

Then, of course, there are the more formal expressions of opinions, where writers synthesize and prognosticate on the most pressing issues of the day in a rapidly dwindling number of publications. The work that tackles the present and its concerns garners the most attention, which can be both a blessing and a curse. Readers turn to opinion writing because they want help in parsing complex issues. In times of strife or tragedy, they may be seeking solace and community. They want to learn and be exposed to diverse modes of thought. They want help finding clarity on issues they find confusing or feel ambivalent about. And they want to read thoughtful, provocative, beautiful writing.

As I have developed something of an audience, readers have reached out to me publicly or privately, asking what I—specifically—think about a given issue. It can be flattering. It can be stressful, too, because while I am opinionated, I don’t necessarily have an opinion on everything. Or I may have an opinion on a given topic but not be well-informed enough because I am not an expert on everything. Understanding when to speak on an issue and when to listen and learn is an invaluable skill I continue to hone. At times, people treat me like an opinion vending machine, asking me what I think about their favorite television show or a politician running for office or a recent calamity, as if opinion writing is merely emotional utterance rather than a practice that requires care and consideration. Alas.

When I first started writing essays, I was often writing to the news cycle. Something would happen, and I’d know I had something to say, and I’d know I had to say something. I sat with my laptop and wrote furiously until I reached the end. I tried to revise these into something I felt reasonably confident sharing with an editor and waited to see what happened next. In the late aughts and 2010s, I published such pieces in HTMLGIANT or The Rumpus or Salon, the first publications that took a chance on my nonfiction. Some of that work ended up in my first essay collection, Bad Feminist. I never really anticipated people reading or engaging with my work, but they did.

As I built more of a career, editors started to seek me out, which was pretty thrilling after so many years writing in obscurity. These solicitations were flattering and kind of terrifying and an interesting challenge. Something tragic and/or culturally significant would happen like a mass shooting in a Black church or the death of a towering public figure or an unexpected election outcome and an editor would email me, often immediately, asking if I could write something within a few hours, a day at the most. Somehow, I was able to do so, though in retrospect, I’m not sure how I managed for as long as I did. After I agreed to an assignment, I thought through what I had to say about the matter at hand, did as much research as time allowed, and tried my best to compose a lucid, compelling argument. Sometimes, I already knew what I wanted to say, and sometimes I wrote my way into what I needed to say. For all of this writing, I was rewarded with the handsome sum of $50 or $150, maybe $250 if I was really lucky.

Early on, I tried to engage in the discourse my work instigated. I read comments, a grave mistake, and sometimes responded, also a grave mistake. Rarely do good things happen in comment sections, particularly when they are unmoderated. These toxic engagements had little to do with what I actually wrote and they made me brittle and overly defensive. It has taken a long time to undo that calcification, to recognize that my work is to write as well as I can, and that I don’t have to debate random internet strangers simply because they want to have a conversation.

What was once flattering eventually started to feel like something of a burden. Editors, wanting to stay ahead of the news cycle, prioritized getting the first reactions published without really caring if those reactions were also the best or most thoughtful. One of the greatest gifts of my career has been to finally reach a place where I can take time to write, where I can prioritize quality over speed.

I have enjoyed the opportunity to share my perspective or to argue against something I find intolerable or abhorrent or for something I passionately believe in. I don’t take it for granted. I have access to a world I previously could only imagine—one where I have a voice and dare to use it and know my voice is being heard. On the page, I get to be the boldest, most audacious version of myself.

After more than a decade of opinion writing, I understand, most of the time, that the only thing I can control is what I put on the page. I know not everyone will engage in good faith. A lot of the time, an alarming amount of the time, people will only read a headline I had no hand in crafting. They will respond to that headline in ways that reinforce their own opinions, biases, and pet positions. People will criticize me for what I don’t say instead of what I do, expecting me to account for the whole of human experience in any given piece.

Sometimes, when I express an opinion, readers assume I have far more power than I do. If I don’t find a comedian funny, they make a bizarre, (il)logical leap, suggesting that I am somehow silencing that comedian or materially affecting their career. They presume that, as a writer who does well enough for herself but is still just a writer, I have the kind of power held by the most famous and wealthiest people in the world. They misunderstand fairly straightforward concepts like privacy or free speech or democracy or autonomy in self-serving ways. Ultimately, such responses to my work are more reflective of their discomfort with who is expressing certain opinions rather than the opinions themselves.

I am often accused of being angry because I write about infuriating problems. I bristle at this accusation, because it is one. There is always the implication that anger is wrong, unbecoming, inappropriate. Being called angry is not a compliment; it is a warning that I’m overstepping, that I don’t know my place—even though I absolutely know that my place is wherever I choose to be. Sometimes I try to defend myself, because anger is not the primary engine of my work. And other times I get angry, because anger is an entirely appropriate response to bigotry, systemic bias, and injustice.

Opinionated people of a certain ilk often lament the “good old days” of discourse when everyone, regardless of affiliations and persuasions, listened to and respected one another. I’m not really sure those days ever existed for women or people of color or queer people or anyone else living in the margins. Those seeking a platonic ideal of discourse want people to be able to freely express their thoughts in a vacuum, without context or consequence. They want the airing of opinions to be nothing more than a harmless intellectual exercise. And I suppose, for those whose lives are not materially affected by the issues on which they opine, that might be possible. If the right people agree with your opinions, or if they believe you have the right to express your opinions, they will respect them. They will engage with what you actually wrote rather than some shallow, facile reconstruction that better suits their own beliefs and agendas.

But if they don’t think you have a right to an opinion—if they resent who you are and what you represent—your opinions are a problem. The reach and power of those opinions expands exponentially. Suddenly, you are a threat. Suddenly, free speech, for example, no longer applies. Suddenly, ad feminam attacks are the dominant response.

When you have opinions, particularly opinions that challenge the status quo, people are going to react. Unfortunately, most of that reaction is offered in deeply bad faith. There are the trolls who look for your most tender weaknesses, the places where you are too vulnerable, and then they dig and dig at you. If you’re a woman or a person of color or queer or fat or disabled or any kind of different, that’s what they will home in on. The cruelty can be relentless and heartbreaking. Sometimes I dread publishing a given essay. Sometimes I write something and choose not to publish it simply because I don’t want to deal with the bullshit. I hate when that happens, when I hold back my intellectual work because I am unwilling to pay the price I know will be exacted.

I don’t know what an ideal discursive culture should look like, and if such a thing is even remotely possible on the internet, which is raucous and often ungovernable. Then again, as a writer, I, too, am raucous and often ungovernable. And so I write toward spaces where being raucous and ungovernable is seen as an asset rather than a liability. I write with care and consideration. I write knowing I am fallible. Sometimes I get things wrong, but my intentions are good, and my curiosity about the world is genuine.

In these pages, you will find writing about the issues that have shaped my professional and personal lives for the past ten years. There is connective tissue across many of these essays. I am often interested in identity politics. That phrase is often weaponized to dismiss the concerns and lived experiences of marginalized people. It is used to derail conversations about how identity shapes the way we move through the world and the way the world moves through us. It is an accusation that implies that we can somehow separate ourselves from the very things that contribute to who we are. It implies that we can’t both acknowledge and embrace our identities and be part of a broader community. To decry identity politics, to suggest you are not political, that you are simply human before anything else is, in fact, an identity politic. And that in itself interests me, as one of the ways that people can so utterly lack self-awareness while denying the lived experiences of everyone different from them.

Race is another common theme, though I wish it weren’t, given the breadth of my intellectual interests. When another Black person has been murdered by police or has otherwise suffered the ills of racism, I often think, I don’t have another thing to say about the insidiousness of racism. I and many other writers have written eloquently and furiously and thoughtfully about how Black lives matter, how unchecked police brutality must end, about how we have had enough. We write and write and write and very little changes because the people who truly need to hear these words are not listening, are incapable of listening. They do not believe Black lives matter and so regardless of how many times they hear those words, they cannot be reached. Writing about race can feel repetitive, but then, racism is repetitive. Generation after generation, our culture perpetuates toxic bigotries. Those in power try to hold dominion over those they feel are lesser. It is a vicious cycle, and while writing feels like a profoundly inadequate response, it’s what I know best. To say nothing in the face of rank injustice, as I’ve written many times over, would be unacceptable.

The political climate in the United States is fractured, and I don’t know that those fractures are reparable. We are not merely divided across party lines. We are divided between those who recognize and honor our differences and those who despise and seek to condemn them. During each election cycle, we are reminded of how much is at stake, how women’s bodies and trans lives and queer lives and Black and Latino and Asian and Indigenous and South Asian and Muslim lives hang in the balance. We don’t really get to root for the best candidates. We are forced to agitate, instead, for the candidates who can beat the most odious, vacuous, and myopic opponents. The “electables” are always rather old white men with patrician good looks and moderate politics and a passion for civility and “reaching across” the proverbial aisle. They lack the backbone to serve the best interests of the majority of Americans. Meanwhile, the compelling candidates, the grassroots organizers and inventive mayors and upstart lawyers who rise up through the political ranks, are dismissed as unviable, when in fact they offer solutions for the problems we’re facing and hope for a better future. When I write about politics, I am expressing my frustration about the terrible political choices we’re forced to make, how we cannot succumb to despair however tempting it is, how there are exciting political candidates we should be paying attention to who aren’t receiving the support they deserve from the establishment, and how desperately we need change.

Some of my favorite writing is cultural criticism, whether it’s a book review or the exploration of a cultural trend or an appreciation of a beloved movie franchise. I am writing in a time where brilliant cultural artifacts are being made in professional circumstances where the systemic issues that affect creators’ personal lives are equally present. I write about that, too, about the burden of representation, the pressures it can place on marginalized creators, and what it takes to thrive in a system where we are not meant to thrive. Once in a while, I profile a celebrity. It’s not my favorite genre of writing, mostly because it’s hard to know what to say about people who are written about exhaustively, but it is admittedly fun to wait for Madonna in her living room or sit across from Charlie Hunnam in a cramped booth in a Jewish deli in Hollywood or watch Janelle Monáe twirling around her swimming pool while her Ivy Park coat billows in the gentle breeze.

Gender politics informs a lot of my work, because as much progress as we have achieved with regard to gender equity, there is still so much work to do. It’s a tricky thing, trying to find the right balance between addressing the circumstances women contend with while acknowledging the progress we’ve made. Feminist activists are actively engaged in defending women’s bodily autonomy and protecting our choices. They strive to ensure a future where our lives are not constrained by systemic bias. It’s important to acknowledge that, too.

The book closes with a few examples of solicited advice from my Ask Roxane and Work Friend columns in the New York Times, simply because I love giving advice. It’s so satisfying, even if that advice is not taken. I consider the questions I am asked seriously, because when people reach out for counsel they want to be seen and heard and cared for in some small way.

In each of the sections besides the last, the work appears chronologically, from earliest to most recent. With few exceptions, the pieces included in Opinions appear as they did in their original publications. Any changes have been made only for the sake of clarity.

Because I’ve been writing for quite some time, I am often asked if I have changed my mind about any of my opinions. Generally, people want to hear that yes, I have, as if an opinion is a temporary thing to be overcome. And though I hate to disappoint anyone, I cannot say I have. I still believe we need stricter gun laws and that people with uteruses should have bodily autonomy and that extrajudicial murder is wrong and that democracy is vastly better than fascism. That said, I would like to believe my opinions have evolved, that my thinking grows more nuanced. And so I say that while my opinions haven’t changed, I did the best I could with the knowledge and skill I had at the time. And I continue to write that way. Regardless of how I’m expressing my opinions, I am always, always trying my best.