Boys Like Us

In stunning essays written especially for this collection twenty-nine noted gay writers recount their true coming out stories intensely personal histories of that primal process by which men come to terms with their desire for other men. Here are accounts of revealing one's sexual identity to parents siblings friends co-workers and in one notable instance to a stockbroker. Men tell of their first sexual encounters from their preteens to their thirties with childhood friends who rejected or tenderly embraced them with professors with neighbors with a Broadway star. These are poignant sometimes unexpectedly funny tales of romance and heartbreak repression and liberation rape and first love defining moments that shaped their authors' lives. Arranged chronologically from Manhattan in the Forties to San Francisco in the Nineties these essays ultimately form a documentary of changing social and sexual mores in the United States--a literary biographical sociological and historical tour de force.