Boys and Oil, Taylor Brorby
Boys and Oil, Taylor Brorby
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Boys and Oil
Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land

Author: Taylor Brorby

Narrator: Greg D. Barnett

Unabridged: 8 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/15/2022


Synopsis

From a young, gay environmentalist, a searing coming-of-age memoir set against the arid landscape of rural North Dakota, where homosexuality "seems akin to a ticking bomb."

"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.

About Taylor Brorby

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jarrett

3.5 stars. Coming out stories are the bedrock of LGBT+ literature. Regardless of time, geography, gender, or class, queer people share abundant similarities in their struggles to claim their own identity and merely exist in a world that is hostile towards them. But if one reads enough queer lit, thes......more

Goodreads review by Kristen

As someone who attended high school and college in North Dakota in the 1980s, what is written in Taylor's memoir is how I remember the culture of the Midwest toward anyone that was gay. When my son came out to me, these are the things that I worry about. I wasn't worried about how others, including......more

Goodreads review by Melanie

Maybe I'm biased because I know the author; maybe I'm biased because I recited Chaucer with him in the dark wood classrooms of St. Olaf College; maybe because I, too, live in a prairie state and love the beauty of the high plains. But I loved this memoir and will be thinking about it for a long time......more