Queer Inside

Gideonse, Ted and Robert Williams, editors.

“From Boys to Men”, Da Capo Press, 2006.

Growing Up and Coming Out

Amos Lassen

Being gay and young is the focus of Ted Gideonse’s and Robert Williams’s “From Boys to Men”, an anthology of 21 essays written by gay men. We all know what it is like to feel different and these selections deal with young gays who experience the world in ways unlike their straight friends. There is something there that is indefinable but unmistakably gay. The selections remind us of how alike we all are and yet how different. All of us want to be accepted and that is the key.

There is a variety of authors and a variety of stories but in essence that desire to be accepted is the same. Some of the essays are by established writers while others are by unknowns and it is the difference in the stories that make this anthology so interesting. I found myself remembering things I thought I had erased from memory. I remembered being the boy that I was before I became the man that I am and the sensitivity of the essays selected is powerful.

Sometimes we need to be reminded of how we grew as painful or as happy as it was because it is those experiences that we had that are reflected in the way we view and deal with the way we live now. Each selection is well written and deeply personal and honest.

Rating: 4 / 5

This is a terrific book. Each story is different, but there is unity in how the men experienced childhood from a distinctively gay perspective.
Rating: 5 / 5

Thomas, David, Sean, Marc, Dexter, Johnny, Alex, Brian. I can remember their names and recite them like a roll call of saints and demons; the boys who, largely unbeknownst to them, drew me out of myself and let me to myself all at once in those years between the kindergarten-era dawning of my nascent queerdom to the high-noon of becoming a full fledged ‘mo. Some teased, some taunted, and some were tender. But we never, ever touched.

I thought I’d nearly forgotten them, but they’re still with me. This book, with its highly readable essays, brought them back to me. But more than that, with every essay it brought back to me parts of the the boy that I was, introduced him to the man became, and let us finally finally embrace each other. Back then he wanted to know that everything would be turn out alright, like the boys in this book. Now I can assure him that it did.

The the rare book that can take you back to a time that wasn’t necessarily a happy one when you lived through it, and not only make you want to go there but also make you want to linger. This is one of those rare books.
Rating: 4 / 5