For years, my friend Doug McKeown has been running and directing a group called Queer Stories for Boys, which is a story-telling workshop for gay men. He gathers a group of gay men, and has them brainstorm on ideas of stories – the only caveat being that the story had to have happened in real life. After that, they whittle away at and sculpt the stories, so in the end they come up with fantastic monologues of real life experiences. Betty and I got to see a performance of “Queer Stories” a while back, and were thrilled (and wanted to try to convince Doug to do the same for transfolks, but no luck yet!)
A collection of these stories has just been published, called Queer Stories for Boys: True Tales from the Gay Men’s Storytelling Workshop, and I highly recommend it, especially for transfolks who are entering the GLBT world and don’t know much about their gay brothers.
Here’s the review I wrote for the book:
These stories are as honest as they are queer. Ranging the gamut from tragic to comic, they encapsulate what is often missing in descriptions of gay men: their humanity, their families, and their lovers. These men tell the stories of how they have managed to find themselves – and happiness – at a time when the public seems more interested in what they do than in who they are. Queer Stories for Boys reminds us of the people behind the political diatribes, and does so with elegance, wit, sadness and joy.