Gabriel Smith is a black man in a dress. Always in full makeup, he ridicules, inspires, and entertains; he is both mother and father, pageant and relief. Tortured by his zealous father, Gabriel moves to Cleveland, Ohio, to start a new life. Soon, he learns that his presence, despite giving order to those closest to him, incites fear and hatred. As past and present collide, Gabriel becomes the mirror that reflects the lives of the people surrounding him, the spectacle that isn't as bad as the histories they want to escape completely.
Set against the backdrop of a city recovering from one of the worst race riots in history, The Butterfly Lady is filled with pain encased in the blues. This stunning first novel wrestles with the horrors of love and the consequences of being black, gay, and male.
Advance praise for The Butterfly Lady:
In The Butterfly Lady, Hoey, clearly driven by love for his characters and a passion to understand their lives, weaves a cocoon of community. Fearless, in the tradition of Morrison, he looks under beds and throws open closet doors to present truth drawing the reader in to the place where lives crash.
- Anton Nimblett, author of Sections of an Orange
The Butterfly Lady riffs from the page in bursts and twists, conflagrating image, sound, language and character in a literary mimicry of jazz ... Danny Hoey's confident prose takes the reader into the heart of Cleveland's inner-city where its inhabitants face sometimes unanswerable questions of sexuality, identity, and race.
- Britta Coleman, author of Potter Springs, winner of the Lone Star Scribe Award
Danny M. Hoey, Jr.'s The Butterfly Lady presents haunting characters that ask - demand - a great deal: Understand and embrace the complications and nuances of African-American identity. Arm yourself with these revelations. This is a terrific novel; devastating and hopeful because Hoey so unflinchingly educates the reader. He writes with the fierceness and truth of James Baldwin and has given us a story that lingers and informs long after the last sentence.
- Dana Johnson, author of Elsewhere, California and Break Any Woman Down, winner of the Flannery O Connor Award