So just adding on to that then, my question was, with that situation at the beginning where he was truly like fighting for his life, what made you take on portraying this heartbreaking family dynamic so early on in the book too?

I wanted to explain, I mean, I knew that Aaron was going to represent what we'll call the status quo or now respectability politics.

That he was going to spin this book telling this gay star, you need to stay in the closet, you need to play by the game, you need to keep your head down and be discreet.

And we got to explain why he's bought into that.

And normally what I found in stories like this is the person representing the status quo is animated by self-hatred, hatred of their sexuality or their race.

They're what we know as a sellout, right? And they're holding the status quo because they're hoping that they will be rewarded for being obedient.

And I didn't want Aaron to be that way.

need to do i was just

So do you feel differently about the work that you do and have done on screen than you do about the books that you write?

The only difference is one of sort of to me is artistic control, right? Like television is a collaborative art and I...

go into it knowing that I'm going to often have to trade off what I would like or my vision versus the competing visions of the other people in the room.

And that can be good.

That's not always painful.

I mean, sometimes people come in with a better idea and you recognize it and you're glad to be part of it.

But there is, and there's a certain relief to also with the book that, or with television that you don't have to think of everything.

How were you able to negotiate that arrangement between this man, this woman, their marriage, the life they had in Chicago, the life that he was living in Hollywood? Aaron is

Well, I

mean, we still have this.

There are so many different ways to be famous.

that Lena Horne, in a lot of ways, was, for a Black actress, incredibly famous in the 1940s even.

But by the time you get to the 1960s, has to be reintroduced to a younger audience.

And that just keeps happening, that stars have to sort of figure out how to reinvent themselves in a medium in which it hadn't been done before.

You know, my daughter is 11.

You can find Flow Y styles in store or online at lululemon.com.

Yeah

... it's hard to defame the dead.

But also I do, I try, I try very hard not to have anyone who's real doing anything outside of their known character.

So Sidney Poitier, I'm not gonna portray him as a cannibal.

But [laughs] I am gonna talk about the fact that he and Diahann Carroll were having an affair because they both talked about their nine-year affair, uh, later in their lives.

So I try to be honest in that way.

I try not to give anybody a drug habit unless they went to drug rehab and we know they had a drug problem.

Yeah

What was it like? Spending so much time in that world as a Black gay man today, working in the industry today.

That was one of the biggest sort of surprises that I learned was if you went through the record going into 1954, 1955...

You could honestly think that what was then called the homophile movement, the now LGBT plus movement, is like, you could have thought that the queer movement was going to succeed ahead of the civil rights movement.

The civil rights movement looked almost... stalled permanently.

They couldn't get an anti-lynching bill through Congress.

Every version of the civil rights bill was dying in the Senate.

And so this world in which queer liberation happened before the civil rights movement was an interesting one to ponder.

Who was that for you? Who was your Jimmy? Who was your Xavier?