Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land

"I am a child of the American West, a landscape so rich and wide that my culture trembles with terror before its power." So begins Taylor Brorby's Boys and Oil, a haunting, bracingly honest memoir about growing up gay amidst the harshness of rural North Dakota, "a place where there is no safety in a ravaged landscape of mining and fracking."

In visceral prose, Brorby recounts his upbringing in the coalfields; his adolescent infatuation with books; and how he felt intrinsically different from other boys. Now an environmentalist, Brorby uses the destruction of large swathes of the West as a metaphor for the terror he experienced as a youth. From an assault outside a bar in an oil boom town to a furtive romance, and from his awakening as an activist to his arrest at the Dakota Access Pipeline, Boys and Oil provides a startling portrait of an America that persists despite well-intentioned legal protections.

Author: Taylor Brorby
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Published: 06/07/2022
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.32lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9781324090861


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 01/01/2022 pg. 15
Booklist 03/01/2022 pg. 12
Publishers Weekly 04/11/2022
Kirkus Reviews 04/15/2022

About the Author
Brorby, Taylor: - Taylor Brorby is an essayist and poet. The coeditor of Fracture, his work has appeared in the Huffington Post, Orion, and North American Review, where he is a contributing editor. He teaches environmental studies at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina.