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 Brorby's 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 well-intentioned legal protections.
- | Author: Taylor Brorby
- | Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
- | Publication Date: Jun 03, 2025
- | Number of Pages: 00352 pages
- | Binding: Paperback or Softback
- | ISBN-10: 1324096780
- | ISBN-13: 9781324096788