| Summary: |
"These were the men who had never heard back from me, who had no idea who I was or that I still had their letters, all these years later. These letters never even got the courtesy of a response. In 1992, Brian Francis placed a personals ad in a local newspaper. He was a 21-year-old university student, still very much in the closet, and looking for love. He received twenty-five responses, but there were thirteen letters that went unanswered and spent years tucked away in a box. Now, nearly thirty years later, and at a much different stage in his life, Brian has written replies to those letters. Using the letters as a springboard to reflect on all that has changed for him as a gay man over the past three decades, Brian explores such themes as body image, aging, the generational divide, the fantasies that sustain us, the risks we take in looking for love, and the cost of keeping your true self hidden from the world. Part letter to his younger self, the result is an open-hearted, irreverent, often hilarious, and always bracingly honest look at how our expectations of what we want and who we are change over time. It is also a profoundly moving meditation on how his generation, the young queer people who emerged following the generation hit hardest by AIDS, were able to step out from the shadows and into the light. In an age when the promise of a connection seems just a tap or swipe away, this generous and thoughtful book reminds us that the yearning for love and self-acceptance is timeless."-- |
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