Memories Of A Catholic Boyhood

John D’Emilio is one of the leading historians of his generation and a pioneering figure in the field of LGBTQ history. At times his life has been seemingly at odds with his upbringing. How does a boy from an Italian immigrant family in which everyone unfailingly went to confession and Sunday Mass become a lapsed Catholic? How does a family who worshipped Senator Joseph McCarthy and supported Richard Nixon produce an antiwar activist and pacifist? How does a family in which the word divorce was never spoken raise a son who comes to explore the hidden gay sexual underworld of New York City? Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood is D’Emilio’s coming-of-age story in which he takes readers from his working-class Bronx neighborhood to an elite Jesuit high school in Manhattan to Columbia University and the political and social upheavals of the late 1960s. He shares his personal experiences of growing up in a conservative, tight-knit, multigenerational family, how he went from considering entering the priesthood to losing his faith and coming to terms with his same-sex desires. Throughout, D’Emilio outlines his complicated relationship with his family while showing how his passion for activism influenced his decision to use research, writing, and teaching to build a strong LGBTQ movement. This is not just John D’Emilio’s personal story; it opens a window into how the conformist baby boom decade of the 1950s transformed into the tumultuous years of radical social movements and widespread protest during the 1960s. It is the story of what happens when different cultures and values collide and the tensions and possibilities for personal discovery and growth that emerge. Intimate and honest, D’Emilio’s story will resonate with anyone who has had to chart their own path in a world they did not expect to find.

Essentially this is a memoir of growing to manhood in Fall River based on my Irish-Catholic family in the old New England textile town Fall River, Massachusetts. It is from the point of view (flawed or otherwise) of myself. The oldest of eight children and their first grandchild and the great ethnic surge of Irish, French Canadian, and Portuguese immigrant mill labor force during and after the Great Depression with the Catholic Church in Fall River including a few priests and a couple of aunts who are nuns. All of the above no doubt factors in my mother's nervous breakdown–as I move from parochial schools to the public high school, to a Catholic Seminary, on to the Bristol County (MA) T.B. Sanatorium, where amidst cure and chaos and the medical staff's hijinks I meet my future wife.

The Stone Age: the time before television, antibiotics, novocaine, smart phones, computers, jet planes, and fuel efficient cars, when a war brought out the united effort of the entire nation. Memories of practice air raids and food rationing; confession, first communion and indulgences; soda fountains; a despised race forced by law to sit in the back of the bus; fried catfish and hushpuppies; camping and bird watching; repairing things instead of throwing them away. Read on, in this assortment of recollections, about these and more subjects that will stimulate a twinge of nostalgia in those fortunate to have grown up at that time, and wonder in those who didn't live in the stone Age.

What are the roots of personal identity? In this collection of essays, James Morrison searches for answers within the experiences and emotional reality of his own childhood in an attempt to pinpoint the beginnings of his own gay self-identity. "Although from the vantage point of my present self, I do not remember a time in my life when I was not 'gay,' I know that the arrival at any avowed identity is always a complex process of affirmation and negation, refusal and identification." It is this process, and specifically the ways gay identity circulates before it is even spoken, that Morrison seeks to distill in specific experiences. From the beginnings of questioning his religion to exploring his first boyhood attraction, Morrison's experiences are chronicled honestly and compellingly.

In a warm and affectionate narrative that "transports readers back to a time before cable television, cell phones, and the Internet" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution), John Bernard Ruane paints a marvelous portrait of his Irish-Catholic boyhood on the southwest side of Chicago in the 1960s. Capturing all the details that perfectly evoke those bygone days for Catholics and baby boomers everywhere, Ruane recounts his formative years donning the navy-and-plaid school uniform of St. Bede's: the priests and nuns; bullies, best friends, and first loves; and most memorable teachers -- including the miniskirted blonde who inspired lust among the fifth-grade boys but was fired for protesting the Vietnam War. Here are stories from the heart of his hardworking, blue-collar family: the good times and bad; sibling rivalries; summers by the lake; delivering newspapers in the frigid Chicago winter; the fire that destroyed the family home; and the loss of their beloved mother to cancer. And here are priceless accounts of Ruane's days as an altar boy: from an embarrassing bell-ringing mishap, to serving a strict pastor who built a magnificent church but couldn't inspire Christian spirit, to the Heaven-sent guitar-playing priest who turned worship around for a generation of youth.

While all supported movements for the rights of labor, racial minorities, and women, some endorsed the military-industrial order that established the professional-managerial class as a dominant national force, while others favored a decentralized political economy of worker self-management. At the same time, McCarraher recasts the debate about the "therapeutic ethic" by tracing a shift, not from religion to therapy, but from religious to secular conceptions of selfhood.

Autobiographical account of the first 17 years of one of Australia's premier jazz pianists, and the son of notable foreign correspondent, Richard Hughes. Tells of his life with his grandparents and his schooling by the Christian Brothers. Indexed. By the author of 'Daddy's Practising Again'.