BOYS AND OIL
Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land
by Taylor Brorby
Liveright. 352 pages, $27.95
OVER TWO DECADES AGO, Kathleen Norris published Dakota, a wonderfully poetic and ruminative memoir about life on the Great Plains from a spiritual point of view. Now comes Taylor Brorby’s Boys and Oil, an equally contemplative book, this time attempting to capture the experience of growing up gay in that beautiful but bleak environment.
As Brorby writes, the Great Plains makes one observant, and that he certainly is as he painstakingly details the subtle color gradations of a prairie sunset: “The dome of the sky smolders cerulean, sapphire, indigo, crimson, amber, saffron, lavender, periwinkle, and plum.” It is also a landscape where things can turn on a dime, and not just the weather—things like the quiet bar with Hank Williams playing on the jukebox, old-timers drinking in the shadows, the sharp crack of billiard balls. It all sounds very pleasant and peaceful, until suddenly it isn’t.
Probably someone who didn’t grow up gay in a small town can never understand the constant need to hide, the ever-present sense of danger, and the persistent feeling of shame thrust upon them for who they are. Brorby realizes at a tender age—as most gay and lesbian people do—that to survive in the world, he’ll have to hide what he actually likes. He recalls secretly watching Will & Grace in the basement with the volume turned low, and would quickly change the channel whenever anybody came in. He takes up wrestling because it’s the only way a boy is permitted to touch another boy—that is, adversarially, with only power and subjugation of the other as the goal.
“To live on the prairie,” Brorby writes, “is to be hunted, whether by a coyote, by a pack of boys, or by the sting of loneliness.”
This damage on a personal level echoes the damage being done to the land around him: broken land and broken lives. Even as he describes the North Dakota landscape he loves, Brorby is aware of the oilmen blowing up the ancient seabeds two miles underground, and concludes: “The story of North Dakota is then the story of self-destruction. Everything leaves North Dakota full and comes back empty. The only way I’ve understood my home is by getting out, escaping its crushing weight, watching the destruction now from the outside.”
Brorby’s patient and closely watched childhood experience of the prairie enables him to recount the movement away from this world, as well as his own gradual understanding of it. He leaves first for college, then later for teaching posts on both coasts, and at last enters a life of activism fighting against the destruction of the land by oil companies. The narrative he lays out is that of a child spurred by the ever-present disapproval around him to become a super-achiever, the perfect child who’s probably overcompensating for feelings of being inadequate, unloved, ashamed—this despite his many achievements and acceptance into more than one Ivy League college. It also fuels a growing problem with alcohol and several unsuccessful suicide attempts.
Brorby is a gifted storyteller whose voice has an immediacy that makes one feel he’s telling the story directly to the reader. However, the narrative slackens a bit in the last third of the book as he elaborates the eventual playing out of all these various struggles. Indeed, the best parts of Boys and Oil are the early, almost morbidly compelling details of growing up gay in such a hostile environment—a struggle that many gay readers will be able to recognize.
Boys and Oil is also something larger than that, though: a trenchant and still relevant critique of what constitutes American masculinity for the majority of Americans today, and its tragic consequences. It is also ironic, but perhaps fitting in a way, that only someone who sees himself forever outside these norms could write about them so perceptively and convincingly.
It would not really be spoiling things to say that there is no neat resolution in the end: no longed-for reconciliation with his parents, whom he goes for years without seeing or speaking to, and who never accept him after he eventually comes out. As he points out to a friend, the ruts of Custer’s wagon track are still visible in the prairie soil, to which the friend replies: “This place never heals.” Brorby himself remarks that, even though certain television shows provide the illusion that things are getting better and that we no longer need to live in fear, he is forced to conclude: “We do live in fear.”
Boys and Oil documents all of this splendidly and poetically. Near the end of the book, Brorby visits an uncle who carves wooden crosses with inscriptions like “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The uncle sums it up best when he comments, both literally and metaphorically, on how hard it is to get the words in the inscriptions to flow smoothly: “The truth of the matter is, Taylor, cutting out ‘truth’ is fucking hard.”
Dale Boyer’s latest work is Columbus in the New World: Selected Poems (OhBoyBooks).
