"I felt I was a monster incapable of love," says Jonathan Rauch, author of moving new memoir, Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul. "Love to me would have to mean love for a man."
Rauch, an award-winning journalist, guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, and Reason contributor, recounts his intense and confusing struggles coming of age as a homosexual in 1970s' America. Trapped with the knowledge he was different, Rauch convinced himself that he would never find love or get married since either would require acknowledging his sexual preference. The result, writes Reason's Nick Gillespie at Amazon, is "one of the best essays on adolescence, sexuality, and love imaginable" and an absolutely compelling tour through the past 50 years of changing mores and attitudes toward the varieties of human experience.
"When I showed [Denial] to people, especially straight people," says Rauch, "they said again and again, 'I lived through a version of that.'"
Gillespie sat down with Rauch to talk about Denial, his first crush and sexual awakening, and his eventual marriage.
Denial is available as a Kindle single e-book at Amazon and elsewhere. It is published by The Atlantic, whose whole slate of e-books is online here.
About 10 minutes.
Camera by Amanda Winkler and Joshua Swain; edited by Swain.
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