Snag How I Learned To Snap: A Small-Town Coming-Out And Coming-Of-Age Story Articulated By Kirk Read Expressed As Softcover

particularly linear and not consistently perfect as i know some of Kirk's performed pieces can be, a seemingly charmed life though one with dings and dents and detours along its path, What a relatable and really funny recollection of what it was like to come of age as an out, happy and welladjusted GenX gaydreamer.
I have never learned how to snap but Kirk Read certainly reminded me How I Learned to Be Me.
Ive read this before but it had been ages and his stories were a charming and very appropriate companion for spending Thanksgiving with my always ever supportive family.
i was sobbing at the end, ugh. straight high school. boys. masculinity. teachers without thought. Seriously thought I was reading about my own life well except the playwright thing, He and I were born the same year and we grew up with the same issues and things.
It was wonderful to know someone somewhere grew up just like me, With bold Southern humor, journalist and performer Kirk Read takes readers on a guided tour of his precocious and courageous adolescence.
Recalling his years as an openly gay high school student, Read describes how he navigated the hallways with his sense of humor and dignity intact.
He fondly recalls his initiations into sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, as well as his shy as neon acts of rabble rousing during high school.
How I Learned to Snap is a refreshingly victimfree story in which queer teenagers are creative, resilient, and ultimately heroic.
/star for some adorable, tender moments, Another/star for quick wit and sassy gay voice,

deducted for: stereotyping groups of other people although the book is about him not wanting to be stereotyped for being gay strange ordering of chapters which grew annoying: and persistent use of the phrase, "the the chagrin of.
. . "

I'm not trying to trash the book, but I must be honest, You'll like the book if you can focus on the adorable, tender moments and the quick wit/sassy gay voice.
Hard to get hold of this book, Author had interesting comments about his relationship, as a gay teenager, with adults, This quick read was quite delightful, For me, it was one of those laugh out loud books that I picked up after reading Eugenides' Middlesex.
The title is one of the best I have seen recently,

It's catchy and really quite fun to say,

"Kirk Read is the authentic man" Oh, man, I read it is one day, which is quite the feat for me!

I really wanted to know more of his story, to see what happened next, etc.
And I read parts of it out loud to my fiancee, for two different reasons:so funny! andso horrifying!

I think the book description/subtitle/premise doesn't do justice to the actual story.
Everybody's lives are more complicated than what Read's father calls "singleissue", and I think that this book does an awesome job of not cutting corners to make it more palatable, more "ontopic" or whatever.
But I think that the book isn't a small town comingout story,

The protagonist comes out in waves, and sometimes not at all, It isn't so much about his hometown or high school as how he survived by getting out and being "taken care of" by predatory older men.
He repeatedly explains that it wasn't wrong for him and it wasn't abuse, etc, And obviously, he gets to have his own experience,

But what I read was really disturbing to me, I could relate to a lot of the experiences, and now, looking back, I get to untangle those and see, yes, that was of great use to me as a survival mechanism, and also, it hurt me.
I'll take the example of relying on older people as the source of my worth and validation: there were many older people who were looking out for me and took care of me, but they did so by maintaining appropriate boundaries with me, treating me respectfully and ageappropriately.
I had teachers who recommended books to me and lots of people who worked with youth who would talk to me for hours about philosophy and the state of souls and God and literature and whatever I liked, and it got me through.
But, there were tradeoffs I didn't develop those kinds of relationships with my peers until I was well into my midtwenties I got to maintain my sense of "terminal uniqueness" long past the point where it made sense or helped me and I was at risk for inappropriate attention from people with bad boundaries.
I can see now which people were actually a threat to me my intuition protected me at the time too and how I was covertly abused by people who took advantage of my precociousness.


I think that the story is complicated by the fact that he seems to think that being queer, rather than leaving one susceptible to this kind of abuse, is actually a justification for it.
He says that he would've dithered and been boring I'm paraphrasing and it would've been tedious, if he had come out at his own pace.


And maybe it would've been for him, I found any kind of waiting excruciating until I got some recovery, actually, but I am grateful for the slow pace of my coming out to myself and to others.
My psyche knew what to do and when, and it really helped me to keep my side of the street clean for a lot longer that my learning I was "gay" was selfdiscovery and not based on sexual experiences with older people.


Wow, as with all of these reviews, I have said a lot about myself,

The book: wellwritten, mostly, laughoutloud funny at times, cringeinducingly unselfaware, If I were a rich philanthropist, I would ensure that every high school in America carried Mr, Read's book. Though he admits that his West Virginian coming out story is unique in that he had the support of his family and friends, his tale is a guide on how to begin the lifelong commitment to coming out.
He recommends that you do not disappear from your hometown, but make appearances to allow the locals to know you as a gay adult, to answer questions and remove the mystery of gay life from the equation, and to be honest to your calling at all times.
He also makes an appeal for more openly gay role models and understanding teachers who can answer questions of both gay and straight students.
Each short chapter contains a lesson learned, including the title story, where an older gay teen shows him how to snap as means of saying, "I am not afraid.
" A must read for any gay teen and their parents, Yay Brokelyn Book Swap! I traded the abysmal Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England for this snappy see what I did there little number.
It's super fun so far!



Oh I forgot to review this and somehow like a month has gone by and I've forgotten all about it.
Well, not all about it I do remember that it wasn't very good,

I mean, I thought it was going to be this really sad/hopeful thing, where the young pretty gay boy was repressed and made miserable by his smalltown compatriots, the sensitive artist working his way through the ignorant masses to eventually emerge, scathed and bruised but hopeful, into a clearer world of sophistication and creativity.
But actually This guy seems to have had it great, His firebrand mom was letting him work at a record store and have his friends take him to punk shows when he was like thirteen.
His exarmy taskmaster father somehow looked the other way when a much much older "friend" spent the night like every weekend when he was in high school.
All his teachers recognized his great creativity, he won all sorts of awards, got to go on monthlong retreats with a bunch of again, much older naked hippies and performance artists.
All the girls were in love with him, all the boys looked up to him, even the jocks and the meatheads took him cowtipping and shared their PBRs and told him he was a good dude.
Charmed life, much

Even on the few occasions when he's relating a story of failurekids calling him a faggot, getting into fist fightshe still tells it as if he's the winner.
Which, maybe that's how he needs toremember it, or shit, maybe that's really how it was, But it all just felt somehow, . . dishonest. Way too selfaggrandizing. Though I guess that tends to be the point of a memoir, right

I don't know, I feel like kind of an asshole now.
I mean, I'm not saying that every comingout story should be Boys Don't Cry or something, or that a lack of difficulty undermines one's ability to find one's way.
I just I don't know quite why this guy gets to write a memoir Nothing about his life was particularly illuminating or fascinating, and I was mostly bored by his story.
.