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Synopsis
Examine a moving, personal narrative about growing up gay in the south!
Students, teachers, and anyone interested in gay studies and experiences will find that The Mentor: A Memoir of Friendship and Gay Identity (a 2001 Lambda Literary Foundation Gay Male Biography/Autobiography Award finalist) delivers a captivating and honest look into the challenges of growing up gay through the context of firsthand experiences, revelations, and realizations. This unique book is an intelligent and personal narrative that considers the social, religious, and emotional aspects of what it is like to grow up as a gay male in the south and examines the enormous social changes regarding homosexuality that have taken place in America during the last half of the century.
Written to reveal the importance of the author's mentor in helping him form his self-identity and educating him about being gay, this book challenges the stereotypical idea that, unlike heterosexuals, gay men are not able to form nurturing, fulfilling bonds between themselves. The Mentor delivers an inspiring story about accepting and understanding your sexuality with the help and guidance of other men who have traveled the road to a successful gay identity.
This unique book offers the courage, strength, and support of a mentor to help guide you through the trials that many young gay men experience, such as:
- recognizing the possibilities of exploitation by older gay men due to a lack of emotional and social experience
- creating a loyal relationship with a man that does not include sex but which satisfies emotional needs that many gay men need and long for
- discovering the importance of a mentor to gay youths, since there are few homosexual role models to learn from
Library Journal
While the title promises a study of the complex relationship between an older and younger gay man, it is clear after the first few chapters that the book is more about Quinn and his gay identity than his friendship with mentor Joe Riddick. The book could be titled The Mentee. The author draws detailed parallels between himself and Riddick, both "recovering Baptists" with complementary Southern family backgrounds, but there is little mentoring. Instead, Quinn treads the well-worn path of gay autobiography and fiction, featuring life in the hedonistic 1970s and 1980s, as he chronicles his experiences with licit and illicit drugs, his attempts at an artistic career, his manic-depressive episodes, and, above all, his sexual exploits. While Riddick never emerges as a flesh-and-blood personality, Quinn does, and an unappealing one at that. This book feels like a half-baked autobiographical novel puffed up with pop psychological and sociological background to make it relevant as nonfiction. Not recommended.--Richard Violette, Special Libs. Cataloging, Inc., Victoria, BC Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\