For those who know Warren's previous novels, this is the third in a series. The first, The Front Runner, is about a young gay distance runner who was outed on his way to the Olympics. For those who haven't read The Front Runner yet, Billy's Boy stands alone as a story.
Billy's Boy is a first person story, about a teen's passionate search to know more about his dead gay father, his lesbian mother's past...and his own sexual destiny.
John William, 14, describes himself as "the science geek from hell." He loves astronomy, dreams of exploring the universe as a NASA astronaut. But lately his attention is focused on Earth, his best friend Shawn, and his own awakening body. New in L.A., he hangs out with his straight girl buddy Ana and two Latino club kids, Teak and Elena, that he just met. William is sure he's straight, and he is irritated by Teak's effeminate attitude.
Raised alone by his mother, 13-year-old narrator William knows that his father is dead and considers his Mom and Aunt Marion his only family. But when Mom comes out as a lesbian and William has a dream that his father is alive, he is forced to rethink things. He begins by searching for his father, also discovering a new, communal sense of family in which role models are not necessarily biological parents. Teak enters William's household rejected and beaten up by his own family because he is gay. And Shawn, a special friend of William, runs away from his fundamentalist Christian parents, disguising himself as a girl to evade private investigators. William's search is ultimately for himself, and it is stark and troubling. Warren's (Harlan's Race, Wildcat, 1994) ability to understand this character and tell his story in the lingo of 1990s youth is remarkable. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.?Tom Nielsen, Pat Parker-Vito Russo Lib., New York Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Twelve-year-old William Heden is at the center of Patricia Nell Warren's latest novel about the struggles facing homosexuals in homophobic America. A sequel to her l974 classic, The Front Runner, and to 1994's Harlan s Race, the book stands alone and can be read without knowledge of Warren's previous stories. Billy's Boy follows adolescent William as he explores his family history and delves into the role anti-gay attitudes have played on the people he lives with. A number of socially relevant themes emerge: the role of the Christian right-wing in forming homophobic attitudes; coming out to friends and family; the role of educational institutions in fostering tolerance for different types of students; and the necessity of creating alternative families for those whose biological kin have rejected them. While Warren's writing is often clunky, and her messages about acceptance, heterosexism and the sexual exploration of young teens are heavy-handed, a wide-range of well-developed characters make the book highly absorbing. In addition, Warren's tremendous empathy for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered youth - and her obvious experience in working with them - lends both nuance and authenticity to the book's dialogue. William's struggle to understand his own sexual desire as he comes of age will intrigue adolescents as well as adults and should be read by anyone concerned about the pressures facing queer kids as they navigate life in the late 1990's. -- From Independent Publisher
Patricia Nell Warren has written and published professionally since 1954, at age 18. In 54 years, her subjects have ranged from women and Goddess Earth to human rights, from gay life and mixed-blood people in American history to wildlife, the environment and current events.
Now 73 years old, she was born in 1936 and raised on a Montana ranch. She worked as a Reader's Digest book editor for 15 years, on both the magazine staff and the Condensed Book Club.
Today Warren lives in Los Angeles, where she co-owns an independent book-publishing and media company, Wildcat International, in partnership with media specialist/writer Tyler St. Mark.
Fiction
Since 1971 Warren has published eight novels -- several with mainstream publishers (Morrow, Bantam, Ballantine, Dial Press, Penguin) and several under her own independent imprint, Wildcat Press. The Front Runner, Harlan's Race and Billy's Boy are a landmark series that follows an evolving family through 20 years of gay life. Her most recent gay-themed novel is The Wild Man, a bestseller that came out in 2001.
She also published two mainstream novels, The Last Centennial (1971) and One Is the Sun (1991), as well as four books of Ukrainian poetry.
Warren's best-known fiction work, The Front Runner, was first published by William Morrow in 1974, and became the most popular gay love story of all time. The book has sold an estimated 10 million copies worldwide and been translated into ten languages, the most recent being Italian.
Film rights of The Front Runner have been in development for some years, and recently received a great deal attention as one of "Hollywood's unmade gay films" during Brokeback Mountain's run-up for the Academy Awards.
Currently Warren is working on a new novel titled Wrong Side of the Tracks.
Nonfiction
Warren's newest title is her first nonfiction book. It's titled The Lavender Locker Room, an anthology of nonfiction articles about gay pioneers in sports history, that appeared on Outsports.com. Published in 2006, it was an Amazon history topseller, won the Independent Publisher Gold Medal in the gay-lesbian category, and was a finalist in the Benjamin Franklin Awards.
Warren's articles and op-eds have appeared in a variety of mainstream publications, including Atlantic Monthly, Los Angeles Times, Reader's Digest, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Modern Maturity, Persimmon Hill, New York Press, Des Moines Register, Mythosphere, Corporate Africa. She has also published in various leading gay publications.
For A & U Magazine she writes a monthly column on the politics of AIDS and public health. Online, she blogs at The Bilerico Project, the most popular and politically vociferous glbt blog on the Web, as well as the Huffington Post.
She is also writing further sports profiles for Outsports.com and Lavender Locker Room II.
Film Development
As a result of interest in movies based on her novels, Warren has moved into active development herself as an executive producer, in partnership with Greg Zanfardino of Moniker Entertainment.
At present, she has several docudrama projects on her slate, including an Australian group's novel search for the wreck site of Amelia Earhart's aircraft in Papua New Guinea.
Activism and Politics
Warren's political activism started during the 1960s, with efforts -- while still a Reader's Digest editor -- to have American media recognize the individuality of Ukrainians and other ethnic groups in the USSR.
In the 1970s Warren was the plaintiffs' spokesperson for Susan Smith v. Reader's Digest, a landmark lawsuit that resulted in a class-action victory for women. As a former amateur athlete, Warren helped lead a group of women distance runners who forced the AAU (Amateur Athletic Union, the then governing body of amateur sports in the U.S.) to change discriminatory rules in the mid-70s.
More recently, in the free-speech realm, Warren has been a named plaintiff in both federal lawsuits over Internet censorship -- namely ACLU v. Reno (which went to the U.S. Supreme Court and resulted in a victory for the plaintiffs) and the more recent ACLU lawsuit over the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which was also struck down as unconstitutional.
Her most recent political step was her first time out as a candidate in 2007. She ran for city council in West Hollywood, CA, on a platform that included a goal of WeHo being the first in the country to offer universal single-payer healthcare to its residents. She lost to an incumbent, but ran a creditable campaign and got 23 percent of the vote.
As recognition for her activism and contribution to public, Warren has won a number of awards, including New York City's Public Advocate Award and the Barry Goldwater Award.
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More information on Warren can be found at : www.wildcatpress.com and www.patricianellwarren.com.
When I first read "The Front Runner" years ago, I couldn't have predicted were the story would go. Rereading it after reading "Billy's Boy," I can see how far the characters, and we, have come. Billy's story couldn't have been told back then. It takes us into the thoughts, worries, and doubts of a remarkable young man and the remarkable adults who nuture him. We get to see, close up, the effects of stifling religious proscription and the terrible cost it has on those with such a narrow faith. We also get to see how fully secure, responsible people bind themselves together to stand up for their rights. What started out as a simple love story has blossomed into a clear look at created families and the superiority they have, in some cases, to their biological progenitors. I hope the story continues. But, if it doesn't, I hope that Patricia Nell Warren publishes an account of how she wrote "Billy's Boy." It would be especially interesting to find out how her work and advocacy with gay and lesbian youth helped her create the wonderful story she told.
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THE FRONT RUNNER was perhaps the best gay oriented novel I have ever read. Who didn't come to love, admire, respect and mourn Billy Sive? By the time we turned the last page, we had found and lost our best friend. In HARLAN'S RACE we looked for closure to that first story and slowly healed as the characters themselves did. Now with BILLY'S BOY, I find myself dipping my mind into a haunting memory pool hoping to rediscover Billy Sive all over again and coming up very disappointed. The author writes as well as ever, the characters are as interesting and touching as ever, it's just that the story doesn't fill the void that was left us in THE FRONT RUNNER. Like the ghostly character that haunts these three books, the race is an unfinished one.
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In BILLY'S BOY, the third leg of THE FRONT RUNNER saga, Patricia Nell Warren is back in full stride ahead of the literary pack. A front runner in its own right, BILLY'S BOY shatters records and societal myths while keeping pace with some of our familiar family from THE FRONT RUNNER and introducing us to a whole new generation. BILLY'S BOY strides to new distances since THE FRONT RUNNER and HARLAN'S RACE, picking up the shattered pieces of some familiar lives and racing through some harrowing new territory with today's generation of youth. Some wonderful and unpredictable plot twists and a heart bigger and more vast than the cosmos that John William --our protagonist, BILLY'S BOY-- so desperately loves to search and explore in his dreams and with his telescope.
BILLY'S BOY is a must-read for all, though especially for teens, particularly those traveling down the tempting tarnished yellow brick road of gaydom. Many will find themselves here in these pages but more importantly they will find that family is not a basic unit one is borne into but brought unto, and the ties of chosen family are far stronger and much more reliable than the bonds of blood that often blind and break us for being who we really are. Beautifully deep and deeply beautiful, BILLY'S BOY spans the yawning chasm know as the generation gap and brings us all to the realization we are never alone in our aloneness and not that different in our differences.
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First Sentence:
The USS Memo was special, because they built her out of the rarest, safest metal in the universe. Read the first pageKey Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Cat Nebula, Auntie Marian, New York, Point Reyes, Costa Mesa, San Francisco, Santa Monica, Orange County, Billy Sive, Los Angeles, Star Wars, Summer Triangle, West Hollywood, Sunny Valley, Prescott College, Aunt Marian, Children's Services, Crosscreek Mall, John Sive, Left Handed, Mission Phase, Rodney King, Axl Rose, Children of the Night, Harlan Brown
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