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Only To Be Completely Consumed
Freedom Boulevard follows two people looking for reinvention but instead find a city that tests their insecurities and vulnerabilities at every turn. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I’ve been a creative seeking the right avenues—and at times, reinvention—for much of my life. Andy and Sakeenah’s stories are a culmination of firsthand and secondhand experiences. They represent those moments when a creative type bets big on a metropolitan area as their new base, only to be completely consumed by the local culture, poverty, and politics.
Andy and Sakeenah have very different inner lives but parallel struggles—what made you decide to structure the novel in alternating first-person voices?
In the literary realm, I’d be daft not to credit the Urban Fiction writers who mastered the dual-perspective novel decades ago—people like K’Wan and Sister Souljah. I wanted to bring that fast-paced, modern structural style to a narrative that otherwise might have existed in the eras of Jack Kerouac or Charles Bukowski—assuming they stayed sober enough to actually go outside.
The book engages heavily with themes of exploitation, intimacy, and transactional relationships. What conversations were you hoping to open about those dynamics?
Exploitation, intimacy, and transaction are much bigger parts of the modern LGBT experience than most within the community would publicly admit. Grids on location apps dominate the hookup scene, making monogamous dating look more like a corporate PR stunt or a suburban rarity than the norm. The book forces the reader to confront these harsh realities. For example, Andy’s foray into escorting is what ultimately keeps him fed and sheltered, even if his surroundings are rapidly dilapidating. On the flip side, Sakeenah’s Islam keeps her head on straight, but it also births a world of hypocrisy and unrealistic expectations that she has to grapple with daily until she nearly loses her mind. Glimpses of characters like Tony Vee, Clyde, or Janice aren’t just setups for future installments; they’re raw slices of life pulled straight from those environments.
What do you hope readers carry with them after leaving the world of Freedom Boulevard?
Ultimately, I hope readers walk away with an authentic literary experience. This is not the type of “LGBT Fiction” designed to make you feel cozy or encourage you to buy a rainbow “Ally” pin. This is a cold glimpse of real-life problems hitting a real-life community in real-life cities. The series only expands from here, highlighting a myriad of characters across this diaspora.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website
Andy Blackwell is a bisexual hip-hop artist who burned every bridge in Maryland to chase the neon lights of the West. But in Cordova, exposure isn’t free. Desperate to keep a roof over his head, Andy finds himself entangled in the brutal web of Tony Vee, a nightlife kingpin who treats human beings like expendable assets. Traded between seedy club promoters, lonely sugar daddies, and the criminal underworld, Andy is sprinting headfirst toward a dead end.
Sakeenah Bailey is a bipolar, trans Muslima writer fleeing the suffocating judgment of conservative Connecticut. She arrives in the desert seeking a creative awakening, but quickly drowns in the legalized, soul-numbing haze of the city’s medical marijuana industry. Trapped in a roach-infested motel and tangled in a violently toxic romance, Sakeenah trades her spiritual compass for a paycheck in a corporate weed factory.
They are two sides of the same counterfeit coin—strangers bleeding out in the same dystopian city. One will find a ladder out of the pit. The other will become a ghost in the machine.
Written with unapologetic, razor-sharp prose, Freedom Boulevard is a visceral, neon-noir descent into the American underbelly. Yusuf Blanton delivers an agonizing, authentic masterpiece about addiction, the dark side of the cannabis boom, queer survival, and the brutal cost of chasing a dream in a godless city.
Perfect for fans of gritty urban fiction, LGBTQ+ psychological dramas, and raw stories of addiction and redemption.
Freedom Boulevard
Freedom Boulevard, by Yusuf Blanton, is a raw, fast-moving novel about two people who arrive in Cordova looking for reinvention and instead find a city that tests every weak seam in their lives. Andy Blackwell comes west chasing music, nightlife, and queer belonging, admitting early on, “I was a rapper that yearned for recognition and a lost Queer in search of his proverbial tribe.” Sakeenah Bailey arrives with her own mix of fear, faith, ambition, and exhaustion, hoping the city might give her room to become someone new. Their stories unfold in alternating first-person chapters, giving the book the feel of two confessions running beside each other until their lives begin to rhyme in painful ways.
Cordova is the book’s real engine. Freedom Boulevard isn’t just a street full of clubs, motels, drugs, performers, creeps, hustlers, and neon. It’s a place that sells people the fantasy of freedom while charging them for every mistake they make. Blanton writes the city as a trap and a stage at the same time, where people come to be seen, to disappear, to make money, to get high, to pray, to perform, and to survive the night. The setting has a sweaty, lived-in quality, and the best scenes make you feel the cheap rooms, bad lighting, stale smoke, and nervous hope pressing in from every side.
Andy’s half of the novel follows an artist who wants recognition but keeps finding transactions where community should be. His world of clubs, promoters, hookups, landlords, clients, and empty promises is loud, funny, ugly, and increasingly dangerous. Sakeenah’s half is more inward but just as urgent. Her chapters wrestle with Islam, anxiety, family disappointment, weed, surveillance, abusive relationships, and the constant need to find shelter without losing herself. Together, they make the book feel less like a single plot and more like a map of two people trying to stay human in a city built to use them up.
Blanton’s style is big, profane, theatrical, and often funny in a bruised sort of way. The prose swings hard, sometimes piling image on image until the narration feels like a spoken-word performance, a panic attack, and a diary entry all at once. That intensity fits the characters, especially because both Andy and Sakeenah are trying to turn chaos into meaning. The book is full of sex, drugs, faith, poverty, ambition, and damage, but its deeper subject is storytelling itself: who gets reduced to a case file, who gets remembered, and who gets to turn pain into testimony.
Freedom Boulevard is a novel about survival as an act of authorship. Sakeenah’s journey gives the book its final shape, especially when she decides that “The pen was my new prayer mat and justice was my new singular aim.” That line captures what the novel is reaching for: not easy healing, but a way to make witness feel like purpose. It’s a harsh, messy, passionate book about people chasing freedom through places that rarely offer it cleanly, and it leaves behind the feeling of someone writing because silence would be another kind of death. I recommend this book to readers who like powerful, emotional stories about survival, resistance, and finding purpose through telling one’s truth.
Pages: 207 | ASIN : B0GSSR7FX4
