Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son: A Memoir
by Kevin Jennings
Beacon Press. 288 pages, $24.95
PERSONAL MEMOIRS, despite recent scandals concerning their veracity, have been increasing in popularity over the past decade or more. The memoir as we know it goes back to the 18th century, when they consisted mainly of tales of heroism and adventure that the writer had experienced. During the 19th century, there was a shift to what could be called sermonic memoirs, those life stories that were designed to make a certain moral point. As we enter the 21st century, it seems the memoir has completed its long transition to pure voyeurism. Now the object seems to be to throw out the intimate details of one’s life for their own sake, for the vicarious pleasure of the reader.
The fact that gay memoirs have been gaining popularity is thus part of a larger fascination with other people’s lives that pervades our culture. Some recent offerings read like print versions of reality television. Indeed, they often mirror TV programs found, for example, on the Logo network—coming out stories, first loves, and so on. And it seems everyone has a story to tell—including Kevin Jennings, founder of the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (glsen), an organization dedicated to the elimination of antigay bias in schools. There can be no debate as to the importance of Jennings’ achievement in instilling some semblance of understanding of and protection for GLBT students, from kindergarten to twelfth grade, in the schools of the U.S. A native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Jennings graduated from Harvard in 1985 and taught for several years in private schools in New England. It was during his stay at Concord (Mass.) Academy in 1990 that he founded glsen, which he continues to serve as executive director. Jennings is not new to writing books, either. His previous titles include Becoming Visible: A Reader in Gay and Lesbian History for High School and College Students; One Teacher In Ten: Gay and Lesbian Educators Tell Their Stories (both 1994); and another anthology, 1998’s Telling Tales Out of School: Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual People Remember Their School Years. Jennings’ new book is a memoir that tells the story of his school years, focusing on the forces that impacted his development and that brought him to found glsen. Jennings knows how to write, so the question comes down to whether the content of his early life is interesting or unusual enough to support such a narrative, especially in an age of sensational life stories. After all, he’s not a former Marine turned porn star, hasn’t struggled with crystal meth or addictive substances, and never worked as a street hustler or rent boy in some major metropolis just to survive. By the standards of today’s memoirs he’s had a relatively tame life. But he does have a story to tell, having grown up in a poor southern family that shifted from one trailer home to another as his father, an itinerant Baptist preacher, looked for work. Jennings describes his family as “a white-trash version of the Kennedys” (a notion I’m still trying to wrap my mind around). If this wasn’t bad enough, right around Kevin’s eighth birthday, his father died suddenly. Already something of a mama’s boy, this identity was now thrust upon him, and he became the object of merciless harassment by his peers. Then too, of course, there was the incipient gayness that was beginning to awaken in him and that he was trying desperately to conceal. This early experience of extreme alienation is what launched Jennings on the journey that led him to found glsen. The rest is a pleasant story that Jennings recounts in some detail. Indeed the book becomes a recitation of events, in more or less chronological order, which may not have been the best choice of structure given the often pedestrian nature of these events. It’s not that the reader longs for a more salacious tale, like the recent spate of gay-themed memoirs. Perhaps a thematic approach would have worked better, one that brought out the larger themes of Jennings’ genuinely important life’s work.
David R. Gillespie is a writer based in Greenville, SC.
