Get The Reappearing Act: Coming Out On A College Basketball Team Led By Born-Again Christians Conveyed By Kate Fagan Viewable As Hardcover

Fagan is an honest and brilliant writer, This book is a captivating read about embracing the essence of who you are, This book was gripping. It was powerful and moving, and showed the difficulties of growing up gay in a world so quick to condemn, persecute, judge, Kate Fagan is an amazingly strong woman to have gone through the things she did and still be so successful, She is a true inspiration, I recommend this book not only to those struggling to come out of the closet, but to those who believe in “Hate the sin, not the sinner.
” I believe both will find great knowledge in this story, To those struggling to come out of the closet, youll feel stronger, braver, like you matter which you do, Also and this for the hate the sin not the sinners youll finish this story and find that youve been so blind to the obviousness of the truth that there is nothing, at all, wrong with being gay.
Its hard enough coming out, but playing basketball for a nationally ranked school and trying to figure out your sexual identity in the closeted and paranoid world of bigtime college sportsthats a challenge.


Kate Fagans love for basketball and for her religious teammates at the University of Colorado was tested by the gutwrenching realization that she could no longer ignore the feelings of otherness inside her.
In trying to blend in, Kate had created a hilariously incongruous world for herself in Boulder, Her best friends were part of Colorados Fellowship of Christian Athletes, where they ran weekly Bible studies and attended an Evangelical Free Church.
For nearly a year, Kate joined them and learned all she could about Christianityeven holding their hands as they prayed for others “living a sinful lifestyle.
” Each time the issue of homosexuality arose, she felt as if a neon sign appeared over her head, with a giant arrow pointed downward.
During these prayer sessions, she would often keep her eyes open, looking around the circle at the closed eyelids of her friends, listening to the earnestness of their words.


Kate didnt have a vocabulary for discussing who she really was and what she felt when she was younger all she knew was that she had a secret.
In The Reappearing Act, she brings the reader along for the ride as she slowly accepts her new reality and takes the first steps toward embracing her true self.

This is an interesting read, To follow along with Kate Fagan and she describes what she went through is both heartbreaking and hopeful at the same time, To see her battles with her emotions and desires and not knowing what they mean while also having to deal with the pressures and prejudices of others and the pain and anguish that it caused her is very eye opening and intense.
If you ever wondered why some people never come out or hold it so close to the bone, this is a good read to help understand it.
This was less about coming out and more about finding herself, Kate Fagan describes her time as a college athlete, where she agreed to attend Christian Fellowship meetings with some of her teammates but then realized she was gay and had to hide it from the homophobic Christians.
There was very little about what the team members who weren't part of that community thought and it doesn't sound like Kate tried to reach out to them once she realized that the answers given by the Christian activists weren't resonating with her.


This must have been a hard book emotionally to write, as the author had to revisit the rejections and difficulties of her college life.
A personal memoir thoughtfully written, My own beliefs are not the same but Kate Fagan shares her heart and story well, It gives a lot of ground for contemplation, Her objections to evangelical Christianity are not frivolous or shallow, but personal and touching, Books like this are the reason that I didn't think I liked memoirs, Which is a shame, as I've readother memoirs this year and they were fabulous, While the book was technically well written, as in, you can tell that she knows how to grammatically structure a sentence, it lacked any sort of true plotline for me.
It read as just a jumbled mess of thoughts, often jumping from one to another without a smooth connection, The ending also felt rushed, I felt like there were so many points at which she could have elaborated, or added more context to make the reader truly connect to the moment.
Instead everything felt superficial, like a recounting of something that happened to your mom, It also lacked any emotional connection for me, Now, this may be because I don't really relate to Kate in any fashion except having a similar name and the memoirs I have fallen in love with are definitely ones where I could connect with the author in some fashion.
I liked that the complexity of Christianity was talked about, and thought that the author did a good job of talking about her feelings toward God and thought about Christianity in general without sounding demeaning or judgmental, even when she clearly did not agree with them anymore.
Overall it was fine and inoffensive, but I won't reread and I didn't particularly like it, Some books simply aren't for everyone! note: read as part of myinchallenge Fagan was incredibly honest in her writing, She exposed her self and showed an exceptionally vulnerable side, Her story is honest and raw, The emotional pull of the book is heavy, coming out is an emotional process and losing your best friend because you accept who you are is heart breaking.
Fagan takes readers through her emotion journey, all the while letting us hear her inner most thoughts, Fagan, Kate. The Reappearing Act: Coming Out as Gay on a College Basketball Team Led by BornAgain Christians, Skyhorse Publishingp. HC.

Kate Fagans memoir recounts her life on the University of Colorados womens basketball team, Though not from a religious family, Fagan aligned herself with the evangelical Christians on her team, attending Bible studies and worship services and attempting to convince others to repent.
However, Fagan soon realized that she was a lesbian, and she found her newfound faith to be in conflict with her newlydiscovered orientation.
This memoir describes her struggles to reconcile her beliefs and her orientation and the effect of those choices on her relationship with her teammates.


This is an unusual memoir, not because of Fagans struggle with her beliefs and her orientation, but rather because Fagan was not raised in a religious home.


Rather than growing up with internalized homophobia, as many religious persons do, Fagan chose to spend time with evangelical Christians during college because they were part of her basketball team.
Although she recounts many occasions where she attended Bible studies or prayed or worshiped with others, Fagan never states that she had a conversion experience.
In the language of the evangelical Christians whom she befriended, she was never “saved” or “born again, ” So her struggle with her orientation focused more on how her teammates would react, rather than how God would react, Also, although she did, in fact, come out to a couple of teammates, there was never a big “coming out” experience where she admitted to the entire team that she was a lesbian and had to deal with the ramifications.
Fagan herself states that she has chosen, as she posits many others in college sports do, to keep her orientation to herself and a few close friends.
In spite of the somewhat misleading title, this book will be popular among college basketball fans and would be a good addition to a public librarys collection.


Recommended for: basketball fans, teens and adults
Overall Rating:/stars
A touching and very well written autobiography, Kate Fagan does an excellent job in discussing the acid sting of rejection and the freedom that comes from being out of the closet.
After purchasing this book, I tore through it in a day and when I did have to stop reading hey, sometimes you have to go to work I couldn't wait to get back to see what would happen next.
I just read "The Reappearing Act", . . I started and finished it in one day, I couldn't let go of the pages that so accurately described my basketball playing college years when I struggled with my sexual identity, while tangled up in Christianity, judgement, guilt, shame and losing people I considered friends.
I was transported back to the pain of where I've been and it helped me see how far I've come into my life as a confident, out and proud lesbian.
Fagan was a studentand basketball playerat the University of Colorado when she realised that she was gay, It was an inopportune time and place for the realisation: while it's not clear from the book how religious/conservative the university and town were, her team was dominated by a crew of evangelical Christians who were very, very clear about where they stood on the subject of sexuality.


The The Reappearing Act's subtitle indicates that this is a comingout story, but in many ways it's more of a stayinginthecloset story, Fagan came out to herself, and to select friends and family members, few of whom reacted as she might have hoped, At the same time, she worked to keep her sexuality a secret from the majority of the team, It's not until the end of the book that Fagan discusses sums up, really getting to a point where she was actually comfortable with, and open about, her sexuality.
That's not a criticism of Fagan herself, of course, but I suspect it might have been a stronger book had it been structured differently, with a bit more time given to the afteruniversity period.


I wonder, too, where these teammates are now, and how their own views have changed, Would they think that if they or Fagan had just prayed harder, things would have turned out differently Honestly, it sounds like, if the basketball team had been less conservative/more accepting, Fagan might have stuck with the religious end of things.
Would her teammates have seen that as better or worse than her being closeted and constantly afraid/guilty Writingwise, this didn't do much for me, but there's a fair amount of food for thought.
A beautiful story about an athlete struggling with with her religious beliefs and sexuality, I great read for anyone struggling to let their real self show through", . . the pain of living in a glass closet, You tell yourself that you're just wearing a coat, protecting yourself in public against the elements, You tell yourself it's just temporary, that someday you'll take off the coat and be the real you, But eventually, years later, when the time comes and you're finally ready to shed it forever, you realize you can't, The coat has become your skin, " Kate Fagan Well written coming of age story about a young female athlete who gets caught up in a fundamentalist Christian group at the same time that she is grappling with her own sexuality.
Honest and at times heartbreaking, College sports and sexual identity, a tricky mix, I wanted to see more from the conversations with Kris, Ashley, and Coach Barry the latter which ended up lasting just about a page long.
Fagan instead focuses on the relationship with Dee, I get it, its a best friend who turns her back on Fagan, but I feel the reader would have more to gain from learning about these other relationships during Fagans playing time at Colorado.
I appreciated Kate's story as she came to terms with her sexuality and her relationships with her Christian friends, It was confusing at times because it wasn't always clear when in time various events or conversations were happening, I also felt the sentence structure was very basic and repetitive, and there were a lot of physical details that didn't need to be included.
This was a much better read than 'What Made Maddie Run' and mostly because she was writing from her own experiences, Wow. I don't know much about US college sports so this was an interesting insight into that world, But primarily I found the evangelical Christianity pretty shocking, In any other context, this would be recognised as radicalisation, The time it took to finish this is no judgement on the author, I just didn't have the fortitude to listen to another serious title in any stretch, This is a great book, I wish I could have been there to assist her when she needed someone, I loved this book although it was heartbreaking, I grew up in a homophobic, super Christian area and Ive since renounced nearly all I was taught, I loved reading Fagans perspective as she tried to navigate wanting to be a believer with her true authentic self, This book helped me confirm my deconstruction from such hateful thoughts, Ive been a Kate Fagan fan ever since What Made Maddie Run and Im proud of her journey to get where she is today because after reading this, I know it was more difficult than I couldve imagined.
.