Race Point Light

Fair Shaw is born just before World War II. He seeks to please his family and of course makes mistakes: the forties and fifties are hard for gay kids. He becomes a college teacher, studies literature, gets married and drinks a lot, but he keeps on, until he can't any longer. He becomes a rebel and an activist and a writer. He pickets during the Civil Rights movement, works the hotline during the AIDS epidemic, and remembers that gay liberation means fighting back. This is a literate book, well-written, well-researched, full of detail about the period and the man. It is a very powerful story and has the same pattern as the lives of many gay men and lesbians who lived between 1945 and marriage equality. Most of them had to learn to fight back.