First Acts

<p> Playwright and television writer Kermit Frazier began life as a precocious Negro boy growing up in southeast Washington D.C. during the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. As a student at an all-Black elementary school Kermit was selected for a newly formed honors track at a predominantly white secondary school. Traveling a complex path Kermit tore down segregation barriers balanced on an academic pedestal and battled an internal war of denial against his same-sex attractions.</p><p> This memoir is not a story about a young man rising from the hood but rather a young Black man struggling with stereotypes identity and mild dyslexia while straddling two middle-class worlds Black and white and striving not to be everyone's other.</p>