Finished "The Boy With the Thorn in His Side" by Keith Fleming
For all the tales of trauma embedded in this book, as I was finishing it off, my strongest impression was of sweetness... Keith's openly gay "Uncle Ed" (a relatively young Edumnd White) was a profoundly generous, kind, and thoughtful person. Really, the kind of person any young person could use as a mentor and guide. How to dress properly, for example, is something I never really learned.
Other impressions: my God, the 1970s were so profoundly different, open, and unregulated. Teenagers could get real jobs, rent apartments, go places, do things, on their own without adults noticing or caring (and the economy allowed that). So many aspects of life were so profoundly different from today that it's hard to even know where to begin detailing them. Profoundly different even from my own youth only a decade later in the 1980s (but after the AIDS epidemic, which I think is not given enough credit for it's cultural impact, also Reagan, of course, had a huge cultural impact). Most obviously, the open and casual sexuality that the AIDS epidemic killed. Also, yikes, the sexual exploitation of teenagers, particularly young women, by older men. Eww. Ugh.
The book itself is a literary tour de force, full of brilliantly written, keenly observant prose. Honestly, it leaves me a bit green with envy as a so-called writer. If you can find a copy (there'll be one available at the Santa Monica Public Library in a day or so, and memoir, history, and queerness are all things you can deal with, or enjoy reading about, grab it. Be warned, however, if this squicks you: semi-graphically (but not pornographically) described teenage sexual adventures on the part of the boy and his girlfriend and their friends and associates, with each other, and others, is part of the package. Also, the whole book is one giant trigger warning for teenage trauma, abuse (mental, physical, sexual), and mental illness (and systems that deal badly with all of these things).
The Boy With the Thorn in His Side by Keith Fleming
Tags: reading, smpl, library-books, history, memoir, lgbtqia, queer, finished-reading