A gay rights activist's funny and thoughtful memoir.
The autobiography of a co-founder of the Gay Liberation Front.
On June 28, 1969, Shelley was giving two gay Bostonians a tour of Greenwich Village in New York City when they “came upon a group of men throwing things at cops.” When the women asked what was going on, Shelley answered, “It’s just a riot…we have them all the time.” It was only later that she realized that the women had passed through the famous riot at the Stonewall Inn that marked a major transition in the movement for gay rights. A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science and the City College of New York, Shelley was a tough, precocious New Yorker who began to identify as a lesbian after having an affair with a woman she met in a judo class. At a young age, the author was confident enough in her sexuality to become a public speaker for the New York chapter of a “lesbian organization” called Daughters of Bilitis, a role she wore proudly despite having to hide it from her employer. “Although I was out as spokesperson for the DOB, I couldn’t be out at work,” she writes. “I was still living a double life.” It was through this organization and its male counterpart—the Mattachine Society—that Shelley helped found the radical Gay Liberation Front, a group famous for organizing the march that alchemized the ire of the Stonewall riot into a decadeslong movement. Shelley’s frank, conversational tone, wry sense of humor, and keen eye for detail make the text feel like an intimate conversation with a radical friend. At times, her rapid-fire introduction of characters and stream of narration are confusing, but the book is a well-paced, highly informative page-turner about a history that is rarely told.
A gay rights activist's funny and thoughtful memoir.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781641609418
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
An intimate, stirring chronicle.
A daughter’s memories.
Booker Prize–winning Indian novelist Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother. Mary Roy, who raised her two children alone after divorcing her ne’er-do-well husband, was a volatile, willful woman, angry and abusive. In a patriarchal society that oppressed women socially, economically, and legally, she fought to make a life for herself and her family, working tirelessly to become “the owner, headmistress, and wild spirit” of an astoundingly successful school. The schoolchildren respectfully called her Mrs. Roy, and so did Arundhati and her brother. To escape her mother’s demands and tantrums, Arundhati, at age 18, decided to move permanently to Delhi, where she was studying architecture. After a brief marriage to a fellow student, she embarked on a long relationship with a filmmaker, which ignited her career as a writer: screenplays, essays, and at last the novel she titled The God of Small Things. The book became a sensation, earning her money and fame, as well as notoriety: She faced charges of “obscenity and corrupting public morality.” Arundhati sets her life in the context of India’s roiling politics, of which she became an outspoken critic. For many years, she writes, “I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I traveled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-warrior.” Throughout, Mrs. Roy loomed large in her daughter’s life, and her death, in 2022, left the author overcome with grief. “I had grown into the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her.” Without her, “I didn’t make sense to myself anymore.” Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love.
An intimate, stirring chronicle.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668094716
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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PERSPECTIVES
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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