Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land

By Taylor Brorby

Book Overview

"I am a child of the American West, a landscape so rich and wide that my culture trembles with terror before its power." So begins Taylor Brorby's Boys and Oil, a haunting, bracingly honest memoir about growing up gay amidst the harshness of rural North Dakota, "a place where there is no safety in a ravaged landscape of mining and fracking."

In visceral prose, Brorby 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 America that persists despite well-intentioned legal protections.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1324096780
• ISBN13: 9781324096788
• Release Date: June 2025
• Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.2"