[6] With a combination of scholarships and student loans,[7] he enrolled at Howard University,[3] where he majored in broadcast journalism and wrote for campus newspaper The Hilltop.
[16] It focuses on his early life as a young Black gay man growing up in a religious household in the southern United States.
[18] Finding that theological debates on the subject did not tend to prove fruitful, Arceneaux decided, "Easier to just clarify, 'I plan to have sex, so I can't date Jesus.
[13] In Vogue, Chloe Schama and Bridget Read noted Arceneaux's "hysterically funny, vulnerable" style, calling the collection "a triumph of self-exploration, tinged with but not overburdened by his reckoning with our current political moment...The result is a piece of personal and cultural storytelling that is as fun as it is illuminating.
"[20] Arceneaux's second book, I Don't Want to Die Poor (2020),[21] expands on his essay for The New York Times describing his private student loan debt.