Beth Greenfield did a great job, and we’re overjoyed. You can read the article on the TONY website.
It starts like this:
Soap-opera obsessions. Elaborate fantasy lives. Suburban isolation. Being called “fag.” These are standard-issue elements of growing up queer for some gay men—especially for the 21 contributors of From Boys to Men: Gay Men Write About Growing Up, which charts the familiar terrain with fresh texture. “To the gay reader,” write editors Robert Williams and Ted Gideonse in their joint introduction, “these memoirs will reverberate like the clearest of bells. To the straight reader, we hope you will understand that whom we love is not our only difference: so are the ways that we see the world.”
That sentiment gives the collection a twist that separates it from its predecessors. Though the editors say they did look toward 1996’s Boys Like Us (Harper Paperbacks) as a guiding light, they made a conscious shift away from traditional coming-out stories. Instead, they asked writers to narrate a tale that illustrated their individual coming-of-age perspectives. “We wanted to know,” Williams explains, “How did they view the world?”
Thanks a millions, Beth.
