Jan 11, 2008  |  By: ZACK ROSEN  | COMMENTS     

In his book “Drifting Towards Love: Black, Brown, Gay and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York,” Kai Wright manages an impressive feat. Instead of an overly theoretical or academic text on the unique challenges faced by coming out in non-white cultures, he simply tells the stories of a few interesting young men and lets the reader draw their own conclusions.

“Drifting” is a non-fiction book written in the journalistic style of Alex Kotlowitz’s “There Are No Children Here” or Patricia Hersch’s “A Tribe Apart.” Wright follows the lives of his subjects over several years, intertwining narrative accounts of their trials with interviews with the main players and several knowledgeable third parties. Recently deceased Greenwich Village activist Bob Kohler plays an important role in providing a history of the neighborhood and giving a context for the current struggles of its residents, but the most engaging voices in the book belong to the youth.

Most of the boys and men profiled are residents of low-income neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Manny is both black and Puerto Rican in his mid-teens and begins tricking in Prospect Park with his boyfriend to finance a coke habit. Julius is an often promiscuous, sometime-sex-worker and a young black man who ran away from an abusive foster family in north Florida to try and make it in New York. Carlos is a shy Puerto Rican, about the same age as Julius, who is slowly working up the courage to come out to his large, overbearing family. And tying them all together is the Korean Lionel, whose newly purchased house in Brooklyn’s rough east New York neighborhood becomes an unofficial community center for all of them.

These sound like caricatures, but Wright’s greatest strength is his ability to take what could be a series of after-school specials and find the truth behind the set-ups.

MUCH OF THE BOOK focuses on Manny and with good reason. Raised in London before a brief stint in the Meat-Packing District and his permanent stay in Brooklyn, Manny’s life is a series of contrasts. He tests into an elite Manhattan prep school where only one of his classmates knows the full details of his life at home, and he drops out after the 10th grade to become a full-time activist.

He has had a boyfriend, Justin, since middle school but only begins to reconcile his innate sexuality with an actual queer identity when he meets other gay youth through a West Village community center. Wright paints the seamier sides of Manny’s life — the drug use and the prostitution — as just facets of his personality, not his entire character. This makes an almost inevitable tragedy hit even harder, because the reader has become so involved in Manny’s life.

Beyond just these character portraits, “Drifting” has an overriding arc that kicks in at about the time the boys’ own stories begin to mesh. Lionel’s understanding of his own sexuality and the role he plays in helping the boys come to terms with themselves serves as a constant element throughout, but the most tension in the story comes over a fight for the West Village piers.

The piers had long been a spot where queer New York youths of color came to gather, and, as it’s stressed several times in the book, it was a place for community in an otherwise white-dominated scene. When the gradually gentrifying neighborhood’s new residents began taking action to keep the kids off the pier, even barring the social activists that waited on the sidelines to hand out condoms, the kids fought back.

Manny and others become involved with the Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment, or FIERCE, a group that eventually wins some success in holding onto the pier as a social scene. Though all the characters do not fare as well, and their futures are left open, it’s this mix of successes and disappointments that cements “Drifting” as a realistic and dynamic look at the minority gay experience.