Author Huck Smith
RICH LOPEZ | Staff writer
Rich@DallasVoice.com
In those spaces between the strobe lights of a sticky-floored gay bar, the dings of a smartphone app and the wisdom of an eight-year-old girl, author Huck Smith has spent more than a decade distilling the messy realities of being gay, being 52 and singlehood into his new collection of essays, Boys Bars Becoming.
For him, this was looking at life through a grounded and grown experience. Initially a journaling catharsis, the book stemmed from a personal exchange between him and a fellow hospital patient at the time.
“I never thought I would publish it,” Smith said about the catalyst for starting the book. “I started posting to social media and found a connection, many things, gay men specifically, were not willing to say out loud until they heard somebody else say it.”
The book came out on May 31.
Originally from New Jersey, the talent manager by day has called Dallas his home for the past year. He moved to the Big D from the San Antonio area.
He’s written and published pieces before, but this marks his debut as a book author.
Smith ponders, laments and explores identity, relationships and everyday life experiences — including gay bars, grief, stigma, love and loss — that he notes land between his own self-awareness and self-sabotage through the lens of honesty and humor.
The true impetus for sharing his writing with the public came from a chance encounter with a fellow patient. While hospitalized, Smith befriended a young girl also undergoing treatment.
Her unexpected perspective profoundly impacted his own, and their interactions ultimately transformed his outlook and sparked a motivation.
“She knew she was terminally ill, and I was there for a rare bacterium found in my brain, complaining every day,” he said. “But I was being cured, and she just hoped she’d finish her puzzle and was excited to see her cat again who was already in heaven.”
Smith wrote about this experience in the essay “Zombie Ron,” the nickname given to him by his hospital neighbor.
Following that experience, he felt encouraged to put his reflections onto the page — or computer screen.
Smith notes that the book’s strength lies in its through-line. By stringing together random essays on dating, death and identity, he discovered a narrative arc that moves beyond simple feel-good tropes.
“I thought I was gonna make a feel-good book; a ‘We’re all in this together’ sort of thing. But the collection as a whole became more thought-provoking,” he said.
“It gives the reader permission to acknowledge maybe the not-so-great part of themselves that we sometimes pretend isn’t there.”
The book opens with the essay “Death of a Gay Bar,” which Smith referred to often. It’s also a poignant choice that alludes to Smith’s own coming-of-age at a time when the gay bar was far different than what they are today. The bars are still convening spots but with a big difference.
“I think this sort of paradigm has shifted. You go to a bar, and a lot of the time, people’s heads are buried into their phones to see who’s at the bar,” he said. “We’ve lost that accidental connection. Everything is so curated, and I feel lost in those spaces and sometimes invisible.”
In compiling his essays, Smith had to confront his own biases on the world and the community. He struggled with the idea of being fully transparent, too.
“The essay, ‘I’m Not Superman,’ is probably the worst version of myself there is, and things that I’ve done. I blocked this guy for an irrational reason and then thought ‘Wow, I would never do that in real life.’
“When you put it on paper, you can really look at it, and then it’s a matter of how honest you are gonna be with yourself,” he said. “If you’re gonna write a book like this, you have to decide, ‘Okay, I will be the villain’ because in some parts, you are. But I can go back and read what I wrote and now have a conversation with myself and negotiate as much as I want.”
Other essays touch on the death of a parent, the stigma against HIV and navigating old school personals.
Huck Smith has a major social media presence, which he treats as a sort of accompaniment to these essays — or perhaps, vice versa. He talks directly to his some 100K-plus followers across major social media platforms about past experiences or current events as a single, gay man navigating dating, getting older as well as a mix of motivational messages and shirtless thirst traps.
“Hey, sometimes you gotta keep the followers happy,” he said with a laugh.
Social media was his testing ground for curating which essays to put in the book. Smith would test his essays by posting (not reading) the topics he wrote about.
“I was trying to create content at the same time, but I could also see what the response was to those topics by people who commented or liked,” he said.
Boys Bars Becoming serves as Smith’s own therapy. But he opens a dialogue that he’s found gay men don’t open up about all the time. Plus, there is the generational space between his generation and the previous generation of the gay male community lost to AIDS, as well as their mentorship, examples and advice to gay Gen X-ers now.
Smith hopes his readers can find a relatable takeaway from the book.
“Maybe people can find themselves in these pages. We’re human first and gay second, which I think is important,” he said. “So our experiences are universal. It’s easy to feel isolated especially with all the social media where people post their best version.
“We’re all more than that; we’re more than a Scruff profile and maybe my own experiences can help people understand themselves.”
Boys Bars Becoming is available at all major booksellers. An audio version will be out later this month. For more about the author, visit HuckySmith.com.