Judging a friendship by a book's cover

Only today did it finally occur to me that I’ve been right in the middle of my friend Patrick’s publishing career. I can’t claim to have inspired his material. His two books, so far, are Appropriating Blackness and Black Queer Studies. Maybe being black and gay is in my future, but the chronology is out of whack to have given Patrick any material. For past influence, I can only claim to have had something to do with the books’ cover photos. One’s a no-brainer: I took it. There's the cover, at right, and here's the link to the original. My hand in the other jacket photo is more indirect. It’s a photo of a gospel choir, with Patrick soloing in a sea of white faces. I wasn’t singing, and I didn’t take the picture. And though it’s Flame-Haired Angel’s choir, she wasn’t singing that day, either. We were distracted. We were getting married. It was a five-star wedding, and the book has a five-star rating on Amazon. So, maybe FHA and I can claim some of that. I haven’t seen Patrick in way too long – since the wedding, in fact – but we’ve been friends for almost twenty years. So it was a buzz to just bump into his author link on Amazon today, while looking for another Johnson. I clicked on his link to see if maybe he had a new book out. When the thumbnails appeared on screen, it was the first time it occurred to me that our friendship was right there, on his book jackets. ..