[ladygreek]

I read the whole book yesterday.

The person he saw on TV was a white man, who won an award, with the last name of Jeter. It wasn't that he thought they were related, but he had asked God for a sign and he felt that was one to get him on track again.

I, too hated that his bio father died so soon. Maybe this book will cause his Jeter brothers and sisters to get in touch with him.

I wanted to scream SO NAME THE D**N FRATERNITY. - LOL

I don't think the names were disguised because I think he would have said so in the intro.

I agree that Basil is a composite starting with the DL football player in high school. But I don't think Mario is part of that composite. I think other characters in his books are Mario. But a distraction for me was I kept trying to see if I could match the characters in his other books with the real people.

I don't think Richie's cancer was AIDS related, but maybe so and he didn't want to expose that to protect the family.

As for Randy, I though it was interesting that there was no mention of evidence of a beating, stab wound, or gun shot (unless I missed it,) so it seems like suicide to me. Especially with that "AIDS will be no part of my reality" comment. His lover died of AIDS so it seems logical that Randy had AIDS, too.

What I realized is that his issues were really no different than a straight person's with self-esteem and looking for love in all the wrong places issues. But he had to deal with the extra burden of being homosexual in a homophobic society. Even being Black seemed to be more of a asset than an hinderance because he was in the hey-day of affirmative action.

Last though for now: as a former IBM Systems Engineer and Marketing Rep., I remember that 18 month training period when if you failed the class, you were unemployed. Luckily for him he was hired during the height of IBMs affirmative action hiring or else he would not have gotten those multiple chances.

Now the depression question:
I think that we as a people have not acknowledged depression because we did not know what it was nor did we have the resources to find out. For the longest, even the medical profession looked at it as a character weakeness instead of a medical condition. Add that to the fact that with our slave ancestry essentially being a survival of the fittest, showing any sign of weakness was not to be tolerated. We could all probably look back on the behaviors of certain relatives and realized that they probably suffered from depression.