In Their Own Words: Readings

Dustin Lance Black is a filmmaker and social activist, known for writing the Academy Award-winning screenplay of the Harvey Milk biopic Milk, and for his part in overturning California’s discriminatory Proposition 8.  In Mama's Boy: A Story from Our Americas (Knopf), Black explores how he and his conservative Mormon mother built bridges across today’s great divides—and how our stories hold the power to heal. As an LGBTQ activist Black has unlikely origins—a conservative Mormon household outside San Antonio, Texas. His mother, Anne, was raised in rural Louisiana and contracted polio when she was two years old. She endured brutal surgeries, as well as braces and crutches for life. Willfully defying expectations, she found salvation in an unlikely faith, and raised three rough-and-rowdy boys. By the time Lance came out to his mother at age twenty-one, he was a blue-state young man studying the arts instead of going on his Mormon mission. She derided his sexuality as a sinful choice and was terrified for his future. It may seem like theirs was a house destined to be divided, and at times it was. This story shines light on what it took to remain a family despite such division—a journey that stretched from the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court to the woodsheds of East Texas. In the end, the rifts that have split a nation couldn’t end this relationship that defined and inspired their remarkable lives.

James Oseland is the editor-in-chief of the food magazine Saveur and a judge on Bravo’s “Top Chef Masters.” In his memoir Jimmy Neurosis (Ecco), Oseland writes about being a teenage rebel growing up in a suburb of pre–Silicon Valley, California, yearning for something wild. He found the punk movement, renamed himself Jimmy Neurosis and embarked on a journey into a vibrant underground world. His quest took him from the mosh pits of San Francisco to the pop world of Andy Warhol’s Manhattan, where he learned the glories and unanticipated, dangerous consequences, that comes with testing the limits. In Jimmy Neurosis he brings to life the cocktail of music, art, drugs, and sexual adventure that characterized the end of the seventies and how discovering his own creativity saved his life. Rolling Stone said “Oseland writes this vibrant coming-of-age memoir in an instantly lovable voice, part surly teenager and part sweetly naive dreamer. . . . At times, Jimmy Neurosis echoes Patti Smith’s Just Kids . . . but Oseland tells this story with a poignant style all his own.”