Since 1993 Gordon has written and published seven novels exploring black gay lives, and the complex, subtle and troubling intersections of race, sexuality and class affecting them, beginning with the New London Writers award-winning Black Butterflies, which attracted praise from Alan Hollinghurst, and including Faggamuffin (2012, about the trials and tribulations of a gay yardie who flees to London from Jamaica) and the Lambda-nominated Souljah, (2015), centering on the experiences of a gay, androgynous African former child soldier refugee and his mother, (also a multi-award-winning short film (dir. It was favourably reviewed in the London Financial Times, which said it was “a damning indictment of America’s racist history.often deeply moving and gripping”. Ten years in the writing, it is an epic tale of black freedom, uprising, and a radical representation of romantic love between black men in slavery times. Patrik-Ian Polk has called it “an all-out masterpiece” Michael Eric Dyson has hailed it as “a dazzling work of imagination” and Audre Lorde biographer Alexis De Veaux described it as “a riveting, masterful work”. Gordon is the winner of the Publishing Triangle’s 2019 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction for Drapetomania, a 500-page novel set in the American antebellum South.
