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Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land: An Evening with Taylor Brorby

Smathers Library, Room 100

Brorby's memoir 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 endangered American landscape that persists despite well-intentioned legal protections.