CR2: Book 17 Growing Up Gay edited by Bennett L. Singer

I came across this anthology while packing for the big move to Texas. I'm sure I flipped through it before, sometime in the early 90's, and had no intention of reading it for the Cannonball Read. But as I sat there, deciding if it should go into the "donate" box or not, I cracked it open and realized it would be perfect padding for my list.

Growing Up Gay is a collection of approximately 50-60 essays. They each tell a coming-of-age story as varied as the next, with of course, the common thread of the author being gay or lesbian. There is no chronological order to this book, and I believe at least one author was writing about his childhood in the 1920s.
The idea the editor had to bring all these stories together came from a feeling of being "different" growing up and having no examples or mentors to guide him. The few books he found to learn about his sexuality sent mixed messages or detailed brutal homophobia. Once older, he realized that "gays are everywhere" from all cultures and backgrounds. This anthology is his gift to a younger generation that may feel as if they are "the only one".

The book is seperated into 4 parts.

In the first section, "Self-Discovery" there is an interview from a 1977 documentary about a young Chinese-American who came out, several stories from men and women raised in extremely religious homes, and even an excerpt from Martina Navratilova's autobiography. It all adds up to "you're not alone" and I appreciated the variety of writings.

"Friendships/Relationships" are covered in the second section, which includes Walt Whitman's "We Two Boys Together, Clinging" and tales of school mockery, comradery and first loves/crushes. I read what it was like growing up lesbian in Oregon, Dennis Cooper's poem "My Story" (about two experimenting high school boys) and a story about a Laguna Pueblo/Sioux Indian who's first relationship took place in 1944 while serving in the U.S. Army.
Singer's careful editing choices were starting to grow on me. Not every story related to me, but I was enjoying the bigger picture.

The third section of this anthology, "Family", fell on me like a ton of bricks. Stories of being Black and gay in El Paso, of changing family dynamics after coming out to ununderstanding parents, of being gay in Little Havana, a Cuban neighborhood in Miami. The fear and apprehension these young people lived with is heartbreaking. The outcomes of their coming-out always different than what they expected. Some were met with closer family bonds, but most were shunned and belittled, and others were committed or met with violence.

The last section, "Facing the World", could have been longer. Included was a beautiful poem by Dorothy Parker, stories of closeted Military personnel and members of college basketball teams facing homophobia, and even an excerpt from Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle (which I loved).

As an openly gay man from a strict Christian background, I saw myself in more of this book than I initially thought I would. Somewhere about about halfway through it, I realized that I didn't need to hear all it had to say, I had lived it. I can't keep this book. I can't pack it away to be found who-knows-when.
I'll look tomorrow for a youth center I can give it to.