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Broken Fever: Reflections of a Gay Boyhood
by James Morrison
St. Martin's Press
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Here's a politics you can get behind: "If there's one thing that marks us as queer, it is undoubtedly our relationships to the body." And bodies are, indeed, where we begin to figure out who we are and what we want. In this astonishing and insightful collection essays queer, African-American literary scholar and provocateur Robert Reid-Pharr delineates his emotional, intellectual, and erotic life in a world that is not particularly open to homos, sex, non-whites, or thinking. Although he's been trained as an academic, Reid-Pharr is at ease in a variety of worlds. He has no trouble writing about a range of topics-- black anti-Semitism, the Million Man March, queer interracial sex, the black family-- and in the best tradition of Gay Liberation, he writes from a position in which the personal and the political are not just brought together, but made inseparable. Academic queer theory has often seemed purely intellectual, detached from the organic, material concerns of everyday life. While all of the essays here are lit by Reid-Pharr's queer identity, they also engage with not-specifically gay topics. He pulls together a panoply of sources to illustrate his ideas. His essay on the social role of black women and the family relies on ideas and quotes from radical psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, George Jackson's letters from prison, and the poems of colonial American black writer Phyllis Wheatley. Whether he is discussing-- in readable, accessible prose-- critically important works such as Peri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets, Eldridge Clever's Soul on Ice, James Baldwin Giovanni's Room, the posthumous poetry of the late African-American writer Gary Fisher, or just describing his sexual relationships, he illuminates what it means to live in the world as an outsider, a queer, and a person of color.

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Taking the wafer

Broken Fever: Reflections of a Gay Boyhood, by James Morrison (St. Martin's Press, cloth, $22.95)

"When did you know you were gay?" is a common enough question, James Morrison retorts: "I do not remember a time in my life was I was not gay." In this literary, eloquently written investigation into what it means to be queer, Catholic, and very different, Morrison loving and tentatively analyzes and searches his life, his past, and thoughts to see how being different-- in the classroom, on the playground, in the family, and even as a reader-- has shaped his life.

Morrison's Catholicism informs the book as much as a queerness does and having to leave public school early for catechism classes carries with it that same terrifying self-consciousness that he feels in when he is in the boy's gym locker room. And this is nothing compared to worrying God would not accept the coin he dropped in to the collection basket during mass. Morrison captures with agonizing relish and terror how a child's furtive and fevered imagination can both generate and eradicate the daily trauma of difference.

Morrison's memoir never becomes overtly sexual; it's not that sort of book. But when he does approach desire-- as in a wrestling match with a schoolmate when they are teenagers-- his writing is pervaded with a stark aura of sexual tension and catastrophe. Never afraid to be explicitly literary in his writing, Morrison moves easily from pondering Bambi-- and noting that it was translated into English by Whitaker Chambers (he of the infamous Alger Hiss trial)-- to neatly tying matters together with reflections on dying and the repression of male eroticism.

In an age of "tell all" memoirs, Morrison is not for everyone's tastes. His book is contemplative, and when he bares all, it is usually his soul, not his sex life. But at a time when much gay nonfiction is more about "sex tips" than sexuality this may not be a bad thing.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com