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Article: Young Man From the Provinces: A Gay Life Before Stonewall.
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- July 15, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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By Alan Helms. Faber and Faber. 206 pp. $22.95
The flood of gay memoirs this season is a marker of survival in perilous times. We've witnessed in scarcely more than a generation a plague whose decimation of young men, nearly a third of a million and counting, is rivaled in U.S. history only by the Civil War. And we've lived through a virulent outbreak of intolerance, gay-bashing both rhetorical and literal, meant to force us back into the closet or to our knees.
The work of surviving continues--there are funerals to attend (such rituals we have invented!) and political attacks, including gratuitous assaults from the White House, to weather--but now our stories ...