A worthy memoir for a truly unique individual.
With the assistance of Ritz (co-author: Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir, 2009, etc.), Bean chronicles the story of his life as a minister and as the singer of the 1977 gay-liberation–themed disco hit, “I Was Born This Way.”
Born to a teenaged mother in 1950s Baltimore, the author was raised by neighbors and suffered an extremely difficult childhood. He was sexually abused at a very young age, by his foster uncle and by other men, and his birth mother died of complications from a botched abortion when he was a teenager. He also struggled with his homosexuality in a religious African-American community. After a suicide attempt at age 14, he came to accept and embrace his sexual orientation. He was also a devout Christian who went on to make a living singing in gospel groups, including the famed Alex Bradford Singers. In 1977, Motown Records asked him to sing the vocals for a disco song entitled “I Was Born This Way, which featured a memorable lyrical hook with a startlingly up-front gay perspective—“I’m happy / I’m carefree / And I’m gay / I was born this way.” It became hugely popular in dance clubs, but when Motown offered him a chance to follow up with an album of heterosexual love songs, he declined, not wanting to portray himself as someone he wasn’t. In 1982, Bean was ordained as a minister and opened his own church, the Unity Fellowship Church of Christ, which was accepting of all sexual orientations. (“God doesn’t care if you’re straight, gay, bi, or transgendered. God contains everything,” he preached.) He also established the Minority AIDS Project to help underserved AIDS patients in Los Angeles. Bean has certainly led a one-of-a-kind life, and his fast-moving, engaging memoir illuminates the 1960s and ’70s gospel world and provides the rare perspective of a homosexual minister. The early chapters, which detail terrible sexual abuse, can be harrowing at times, but the message is insightful and often powerful.
A worthy memoir for a truly unique individual.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9282-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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