MEMORIES OF A GAY CATHOLIC BOYHOOD

Unusual among today’s memoirs, this one is upbeat and generous spirited about its author’s early life and challenges.

In sparkling fashion, D’Emilio enters company with Alfred Kazin and A Walker in the City, the classic work that, in Polish Jewish immigrant tones, evoked the early years of a Bronx boyhood. D’Emilio, a Guggenheim fellow and noted historian of gay history in the U.S., writes about his early years as a son of the Bronx, but in Italian Catholic hues. Like Kazin’s book, this one sings a hymn to that particular borough and to the city as a whole. This is also a son’s tale of a close-knit family adapting to a new world with a mixture of love, aspiration, loss, and tension. In D’Emilio’s case, the emergence of his sexuality in a particularly repressive era made growing up and adapting to American life even more complicated. While the author depicts his burgeoning gay sexuality with unusual ease, this part of him is by no means the only subject of this appealing book. He brings his Catholic family’s religiosity, the priests who taught and mentored him, and his own Catholic elementary schooling richly alive. He also offers a particularly affecting portrayal of one of Manhattan’s great Jesuit institutions, Regis High School, where D’Emilio’s intelligence caught the attention of his teachers to the point where he considered becoming a Jesuit priest. Columbia University also takes center stage as the site of his maturation as a scholar. During his undergraduate years in the tumultuous late 1960s, D’Emilio counseled fellow students about avoiding the draft and sought a conscientious objector deferment while working as an assistant to Margaret Mead. The author’s compassionate spirit suffuses the text to such a degree that one hopes for a future continuation into his years as a professional historian.

A warm, humane coming-of-age memoir that delivers much more than its title suggests.