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Summary
Summary
By age six, Kevin Jennings knew he was going straight to hell. His father, an evangelist preacher, as much as told him so. During the 1960s, Kevin's family moved from one trailer park in the South to another as his dad fought to hold on to a pulpit. Then, on Kevin's eighth birthday, his father suffered a fatal heart attack as Kevin stood, helpless, at his side. When he cried at the funeral, Kevin's older brothers admonished him, "Don't be a faggot." The warning was a key lesson. In school, "faggot" became more familiar to Kevin than his own name. Nobody watching the regular torture of Kevin's schooldays could have anticipated that he would ever want to return to the classroom.Kevin's father may have preached damnation, but his mother showed him the road to salvation. Forced to drop out of school at the age of nine, Alice Verna Johnson Jennings fervently believed in the power education held for her children. While working a series of blue-collar jobs to support her family, she struggled with her conservative Appalachian roots when her oldest son married a black woman and her youngest came out. Alice's story is powerful account of a woman's triumph over huge obstacles, including her own prejudices.When he earned a scholarship to Harvard, Kevin finally found acceptance. His decision to become a teacher, however, forced him back into the closet. In the classroom, reliving the anguish of school bigotry, Kevin realized his true vocation. When his students rallied to his defense-and thereby to their own-Kevin worked with them to form the first gay/straight alliance, and he went on to found GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Educational Network, now a national education organization with a presence in all fifty states.
Author Notes
Kevin Jennings is co-founder and executive director of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This rags-to-riches story, about growing up poor and eventually reaching Harvard has bite and pathos. The youngest son of a born-again Southern Baptist preacher originally from Massachusetts, and a mother from Appalachian Tennessee, Jennings led an itinerant youth among trailer parks in Southern towns where his dad would try to find work. The boy couldn't make his father proud on the football field, and already he had learned that "being a real man meant taking advantage of anyone smaller or weaker than you." With his father's abrupt death when Jennings was eight, he became a "mama's boy," introverted, brainy and overweight, and ridden by guilt at his incipient homosexuality. Supported by his scarcely educated mother, who became the first woman manager at McDonald's, Jennings excelled in school and on the debate team and was accepted to Harvard by 1981. Jennings became a high-school teacher, at Concord Academy among others, agonizing over the decision to out himself; he promoted the creation of GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) to protect students from the kind of harassment he experienced firsthand. When his national crusade brought him back home to speak at the same Winston-Salem school system where his "young soul had almost been crushed," Jennings writes of his journey with graciousness and candor. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
When hospitalized in 1966 with whooping cough--a consequence of his family's extreme poverty, which excluded vaccinations, insurance, and even a doctor until the three-year-old's fever exceeded 102 degrees--Jennings almost died. Buoyed by his Appalachian mother's steel will, he returned to the family's two-bedroom trailer and recovered, but fighting for life left him feeling different and vulnerable, and his mother overprotective. Hence, he became a mama's boy. As for his fundamentalist--preacher dad, he cared only about God and sports, worked construction jobs--and dropped dead at Jennings' eighth-birthday party. He grew up gay with athletic brothers in a sports-mad family (a white-trash version of the Kennedys ) amid a culture that forbade homosexuality. After 12 years of isolation and sadness in public schools, he went to Harvard on a scholarship and discovered new freedoms, but he re-closeted himself when he went home to teach. After two years, he left, marched with his partner for gay rights in 1987, and eventually spearheaded efforts to make schools safer for gay kids. A refreshingly readable memoir. --Whitney Scott Copyright 2006 Booklist
Library Journal Review
One usually hopes for inspiration or at least an education of sorts when reading rags-to-middle-class memoirs, but this title only partly delivers. Jennings, founder of a national advocacy group that supports safety and equality for students and teachers in public education, grew up in an impoverished Southern home, the son of an itinerant Baptist preacher and an outspoken firebrand of a mother. Self-described trailer trash, he fought against a sickly childhood, the early death of his father and the resulting feelings of guilt, and his own nascent homosexuality. He overcame these challenges and more to win an undergraduate scholarship to Harvard. This part of the story is well told, but the second half of the memoir bogs down in the less-than-riveting minutiae of his subsequent career as a history teacher at several exclusive New England prep schools and as the founder of the Gay and Lesbian Straight Education Network. Editorial errors in the advance proofs (e.g., recalling that as a child he looked at his mother's face through an "opaque" oxygen tent, identifying the lowest elevation in America as Britton Hill, FL) are distracting, and one hopes that they will be remedied. More suitable for larger queer collections. Jeff Ingram, Newport Lib., OR (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
