In Rasheed Newson’s new novel, Hollywood’s closet has a body count

Old Hollywood loved a beautiful lie. The gowns, the flashbulbs, the backlot gossip, the studio-approved romances, the private lives that were never really private. Rasheed Newson’s There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood walks straight into that glittering machine and asks what it cost to keep it running, especially for a Black star whose talent, desirability, and queerness made him both valuable and vulnerable.

Xavier C. Barlow is Skyline Studios’ great new bet in the late 1950s, a magnetic actor being positioned as the studio’s answer to Sidney Poitier. Aaron Touissant knows the machinery behind that image better than almost anyone. As Skyline’s backlot fixer, he’s tasked with keeping stars closeted, presentable, and profitable. When Xavier dies at the height of his fame, Aaron begins looking back at the forces that shaped, controlled, and ultimately endangered him.

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That mix of glamour, danger, sex, silence, and score-settling makes There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood by Rasheed Newson our July pick for The Queerty Book Club.

Griffith Park after dark

We’ve already shared an excerpt from the novel, and it’s a hell of a mood-setter. In the passage, Aaron drives Xavier through L.A. at night, from Wilshire Boulevard to Westwood to Griffith Park, where the city’s hidden cruising codes become their own kind of social architecture.

The scene is sexy, tense, funny, logistical, and quietly devastating. There are lookouts, cover stories, police raids, hustlers, johns, and men who know how to disappear before the headlights catch them. Newson writes the park not as a lurid sideshow, but as a living map of risk, desire, improvisation, and protection.

You can also listen to the excerpt read by Jelani Alladin here:

Rasheed Newson knows the machinery

Newson is also the author of My Government Means to Kill Me, and he brings a screenwriter’s instinct for pace and framing to this new novel. He has worked in television for years, including on Bel-Air, The Chi, and Narcos, which gives the book’s studio politics an extra charge. The glamour is seductive, but the business is never innocent.

We picked There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood becuase it promises a mystery, a Hollywood story, a queer history, and a portrait of performance under pressure.

Join The Queerty Book Club in partnership with Allstora by July 15 to get the this book and read and discuss along with us.

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