Boys and Oil

Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land

Taylor Brorby
Regular price $21.75
Title
Condition
“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...
“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.

Publisher
Liveright
ISBN
9781324090861
Publication Date
June 7, 2022
Photo Source
Stock Photo
No. of Pages
336
Dimensions
L 23.6cm x W 16.1cm x H 3.0cm