A brief yet remarkably candid memoir of growing up different, by a world-renowned cabaret performer and transgender advocate.
Prompted to recall his childhood after learning of his neighbor and longtime tormentor’s arrest for impersonating a police officer, Bond remembers in vivid detail his unusual adolescence, including the peculiar relationship he formed with the now-jailed local bully. Living in suburban Maryland in the ’70s, the author obsessed over Rita Hayworth and other stars of her time, danced like Ginger Rogers and enjoyed wearing lipstick out in public, all of which continued despite his parents’ best attempts to “straighten” him out, including wallpapering his bedroom with a cowboys and Indians theme, to Bond’s despair. Throughout this time, he hid a deep secret: a years-long, often abusive sexual relationship with Hunter, a popular, older boy who tantalized, humiliated and even threatened him. Beginning at age 11 on a boy scouts camping trip, Bond and Hunter had sex in pools, snow forts and tree houses. Accused by Hunter’s mother of “using” her son for his pool, Bond remembered the sexual favors he would perform with Hunter for the opportunity to enjoy the pool. Outside of their physical encounters, Hunter either ignored Bond or harassed him, calling him a “fag” and spreading ugly rumors at school. Generally friendless except for a girl, who later took an overdose of pills, Bond’s situation gradually improved in high school—he got his first car, decorated his room according to his tastes and even dated a girl. He finally broke it off with Hunter, threatening to out the older boy if he continued to demand sex. Poignant and funny, Bond offers insight into the childhood and mindset of gay and transgender individuals, but the graphic depictions of sex between young boys may frighten some readers.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-55861-747-6
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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