A forgotten Black queer Hollywood is the star of this new novel

On the Shelf There's Only One Sin in Hollywood Flatiron Books: 300 pages, $29If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.Twenty pages into “There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood” by bestselling Pasadena author Rasheed Newson, I had to stop reading.Not because the story and characters were anything less than gripping —I was utterly transfixed.

Not because I was unmoved by the setting, the 1950s version of the iconic landmarks where today’s Angelenos, myself included, work, play, eat and drink: Griffith Park, the L.A.Central Library, the Paramount Pictures lot, the Roosevelt Hotel, the Tam O’Shanter in Atwater Village and the Black Cat in Silver Lake, site of America’s first queer riot, also depicted in the book.No, it was writerly admiration — OK, envy — that stopped me.

As I turned the pages, I kept scribbling the same question in the margins.“How did Newson do this?”How did Newson, author of the 2022 bestseller “My Government Means to Kill Me” and a producer/writer on such popular TV series as “The Chi” and “Bel-Air,” craft a novel populated with a seamless mix of real and invented characters, each with their own true or fictional backstory, personality, career vicissitudes, sartorial style and sexual proclivities, adhering simultaneously to both his novelistic timeline and historically accurate events?How did Newson seat his fictional protagonist — Aaron Touissant, a Black, closeted gay Hollywood “fixer” employed by Skyline Studios to keep queer actors’ secrets secret — at the same Beverly Hilton ballroom table with Sidney Poitier, Diahann Carroll, Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr., Lena Horne, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, James Edwards, Eartha Kitt and Xavier Barlow, Newson’s invented Black gay movie star who is Skyline’s greatest hope and Touissant’s principal client?I couldn’t read another page without knowing, and those unread pages...