Location: Canada
Member Since:
March 18, 2016
tealeaf1900
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Smashwords book reviews by tealeaf1900
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Out: A Schoolboy's Tale
on March 20, 2016
Forget the details. This story goes straight to your heart! Ok we can all agree Brining got lots of minutiae wrong. Nuking the Germans in WWII? Out is set mostly in the 1980s but some details are off. A picky editor could have done some useful pruning. It's the kind of story I wish I'd have lived back in the late 50s. As others here have rightly pointed out, the --sanctioned, socially-approved-- beatings and bullying was just life as we lived it then. Brining is exactly right when he says this book was needed now because there were no books like it when they were needed then. It's certainly opened up old wounds: being the Senior Sixer kicked out of summer Cub camp for being a faggot. My father having to take time off work to bring me back home. The decades of raw hate that followed. The 'straight experiments'. The suicide attempts. Like Kermit says it's not easy being green. Or gay. JP has a rough go of it. One way or another every gay guy does. This is why I so strongly relate to Brining's Out: a schoolboy's tale. Sure now nine-year-olds come out on Youtube giving their complete real names to the world. Even so they will experience unavoidable and painful consequences for being gay. Brining captures this universality of experience applicable to any generation of gay boys: mine in the 1950s, his protagonists of the 1980s or those brave Youtube kids this week. Forget the details. This story goes straight to your heart!