A jovial yet passionately delivered self-portrait inspiring awareness about LGBT history from one of the movement’s true...
The life and times of an intrepid gay rights activist.
Segal’s swiftly written debut memoir looks back at his coming-of-age years in New York City through his achievements both personal and political, which have made him the “dean of American gay journalism.” Growing up isolated in the 1950s with “the only Jewish family in a South Philadelphia housing project,” the author, son of a decorated war hero, set his sights on New York (“the center of everything”) while passing his childhood years with eyes glued to the men’s underwear section of the Sears catalog and bonding with his civil rights advocate grandmother, who “celebrated diversity before it was fashionable.” Segal’s first interest in newspapers manifested as a young door-to-door salesboy, and then he branched out in later years as a founding journalist of the Philadelphia Gay News. He went on to chair political movements and lobby for LGBT anti-discrimination legislation with learned diplomacy and the launch of a series of nonviolent, press-frenzying “zaps,” which included crashing the sets of the Tonight Show and the CBS Evening News. Amid schisms within the gay community and the beginning of the nightmarish “deadly war” on AIDS, Segal fearlessly pressed onward, befriending pivotal politicos like Barney Frank and spearheading the development of LGBT senior housing projects. In other sections, the author vividly describes his firsthand experience as a teenager inside the Stonewall bar during the historic riots, his participation with the Gay Liberation Front, and amusing encounters with Elton John and Patti LaBelle. In a fitting coda to a vigorous life story, Segal, now 64, writes of finally wedding his longtime partner and of finagling a coveted photograph together with Michelle Obama.
A jovial yet passionately delivered self-portrait inspiring awareness about LGBT history from one of the movement’s true pioneers.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61775-410-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Open Lens/Akashic
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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