Traumatic Bane Injury
I started reading Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas so that I could review it for the Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona Blog. (Lawrence v. Texas was the case that invalidated anti-sodomy laws.) I was worried I wouldn't like it, because I had read somewhere that it reads "like a real-life detective story," or something to that effect. I am wary of any book described like that--any non-fiction book that "reads like a novel" and so forth--after reading Simon Schama's Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution. Such was the way reviewers described it. Rather than feeling like a captivating work of non-fiction, it felt like a monstrously boring novel--the kind of novel you only read because it's assigned to you, and that you don't even finish reading because you'd rather buy the CliffNotes booklet and hope your professor doesn't catch on.
I still don't know how I forced myself to finish that book. Fortunately, Flagrant Conduct is nothing like that. The writing in it is just academic enough to keep your mind alert but also conversational enough that you can breeze through chapter after chapter without feeling any mental fatigue. But even if Flagrant Conduct were as boring as Rough Crossings, the chuckle I got out of this coming-out story would have made some of the torture worthwhile:[Gay-rights activist Ray Hill] came out to his family when he was eighteen. His mother took a long drag from her cigarette and a sip of her coffee and said, "Well, that's a relief." "What?" he asked. Late 1950s Houston was not a tolerant time and place for homosexuals, especially in the blue-collar, religiously devout area in which he lived. "We noticed that you kind of dress up more than the other boys in the neighborhood and we thought you might be pretending to be wealthy and we aren't," she explained. "We were afraid you might grow up to be a Republican."
That response rules.
I still don't know how I forced myself to finish that book. Fortunately, Flagrant Conduct is nothing like that. The writing in it is just academic enough to keep your mind alert but also conversational enough that you can breeze through chapter after chapter without feeling any mental fatigue. But even if Flagrant Conduct were as boring as Rough Crossings, the chuckle I got out of this coming-out story would have made some of the torture worthwhile:[Gay-rights activist Ray Hill] came out to his family when he was eighteen. His mother took a long drag from her cigarette and a sip of her coffee and said, "Well, that's a relief." "What?" he asked. Late 1950s Houston was not a tolerant time and place for homosexuals, especially in the blue-collar, religiously devout area in which he lived. "We noticed that you kind of dress up more than the other boys in the neighborhood and we thought you might be pretending to be wealthy and we aren't," she explained. "We were afraid you might grow up to be a Republican."
That response rules.