How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays

B-Boy is short for Beat Boy. Laymon reflects on the B-Boys with whom he went to school, particularly the leader of his B-Boy group, B. Dazzle. While the term usually refers to the break dancers, often young men, who danced to nascent hip-hop in New York City in the early 1980s, the term also refers to those who improvised rap rhymes (MC-ing) or music (DJ-ing). The B-Boy subculture emerged from Black and Latinx communities in the South Bronx, which explains Laymon’s acknowledgment of the debt that the world owes New York for giving birth to the global phenomenon that became hip-hop. He deals, too, with how deeply gendered the term is by describing how his group of B-Boys used the restrictions of boys’ and girls’ restrooms as a barrier to exclude Black girls while also desiring them as an audience.

Femiphobia is a term that was coined by the late poet and psychology professor Denis O’Donovan to describe a man’s fear of becoming a woman or being socially feminized. He discussed the term on the Phil Donahue Show in 1998. Laymon uses the term to criticize the American cultural insistence that Black boys need the presence of Black men as role models to become well-adjusted.