Description

From a young gay environmentalist a searing comingofage memoir set against the arid landscape of rural North Dakota where homosexuality seems akin to a ticking bomb

I am a child of the American West a landscape so rich and wide that my culture trembles with terror before its power So begins Taylor Brorbys Boys and Oil a haunting bracingly honest memoir about growing up gay amidst the harshness of rural North Dakota a place where there is no safety in a ravaged landscape of mining and fracking

In visceral prose Brorby recounts his upbringing in the coalfields his adolescent infatuation with books and how he felt intrinsically different from other boys Now an environmentalist Brorby uses the destruction of large swathes of the West as a metaphor for the terror he experienced as a youth From an assault outside a bar in an oil boom town to a furtive romance and from his awakening as an activist to his arrest at the Dakota Access Pipeline Boys and Oil provides a startling portrait of an America that persists despite wellintentioned legal protections