Book Review
Kai Wright,
Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay,
and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York
Beacon Press, Boston, 2008
ISBN 978-0-8070-7968-3
This is an important book.
Why would I — a dead, white male, a baby boomer — say that about a book from a culture so totally different?
Because when I was a teenager, growing up gay in a white slum in Buffalo, the Stonewall Riots were some 10 years off in the future and inaccessible to me — and, anyway, they were unthinkable. I drifted, lost, making bad choices and acting destructively — of myself and of others.
Kai Wright writes about black and brown kids today in Brooklyn. You might think they’d have a big advantage — with one of the most vibrant, openly gay cultures in the world right next to them in Manhattan, only a subway ride away. But in their social reality, the white, liberated gay culture might as well be on the other side of the world for all the good it would do them in terms of providing scenarios they can choose from. It’s as inaccessible to them now, for a different reason, as it was to me then. Read the rest of this entry »
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