Eddie Casson grew up on a farm in a small Indiana town where Church, family, and identity
were the unchanging signposts of an acceptable life. Conventionality was more than just
expected--it was the highest form of success. Art, music, and movies might have their place
here and there, but bonus was for boys to excel at traditional masculine
pursuits. Despite always feeling somehow different and apart from most of everyone else
around him, he worked hard to be the perfect image of a son, brother, and friend. Reared in a
household where perfection and faith were the two pillars of the family, he struggled to
understand his own identity as well as the currents of unhappiness--and change--that were
beginning to swirl around him and the outside world. Finding his way out of the straight jacket
of his past into a different kind of future was a long rock-covered road. He would find that his
choices would hurt people he loved along the way, but he also knew that living his true life
would be the only thing that would make it all worth it. And with a loving and forgiving heart,
he would be able to find his way back to people he loved while stumbling forward into his own
happier future.
This book is a memoir about growing up in Indiana in the '60s and '70s as a gay kid and young
man. It is a series of linked portraits and moments that weave the story through. Eddie
worked to really create a sense of what it was like in these particular places in the particular
time. The Midwest in those days had barely entered the modern era and his youth and life had
a truly gothic, otherworldly cast to it. It conveys not just the struggles of his experience, but
the poetry and soulfulness of it as well.