Broken Fever: Reflections of Gay Boyhood [Hardcover]

James Morrison (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 14, 2001

What are the roots of personal identity? In this collection of essays, James Morrison searches for answers within the experiences and emotional reality of his own childhood in an attempt to pinpoint the beginnings of his own gay self-identity.

"Although from the vantage point of my present self, I do not remember a time in my life when I was not 'gay,' I know that the arrival at any avowed identity is always a complex process of affirmation and negation, refusal and identification." It is this process, and specifically the ways gay identity circulates before it is even spoken, that Morrison seeks to distill in specific experiences. From the beginnings of questioning his religion to exploring his first boyhood attraction, Morrison's experiences are chronicled honestly and compellingly.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Insightful and consistently interesting, James Morrison's debut collection of personal essays hinges on his awareness of the countless influences on the young. Teasing out the larger implications of events and choices that must often have seemed slight at the time--such as his decision to play the violin, "in spite of the stigma of sissyhood"--he casts a fond but critical eye on his boyhood self and the gradual development of his gay identity. Although he was reasonably well-liked at school, Morrison's fate was sealed in fourth grade when a forgotten copy of Pinocchio slid out of his desk onto the floor, its binding breaking open and its pages scattering over the classroom floor: "I was as instinctively right, after this inadvertent apocalypse, to foresee doom as I had been, before, to keep the book a secret." A funny, astute observer of social nuances, and a wry commentator on the more obvious hierarchies and abuses of power, Morrison follows in the footsteps of Edmund White's (A Boy's Own Story) and--though with less spite--the master, Gore Vidal.--Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly

"I do not remember a time in my life when I was not gay," writes Morrison in this elegantly crafted exploration of growing up homosexual and Catholic. His delicate, extended examination of difference--in the classroom, on the playground, in his family and even as a reader--should make this nuanced memoir resonate with a wide audience. Morrison deftly portrays how a child's furtive imagination can both create and expunge the daily trauma of difference: whether that difference means having to leave public school early for catechism classes, experiencing terrifying self-consciousness in the boy's gym locker room or worrying that God would not accept a coin dropped into a collection basket during Mass. While the memoir never becomes overtly sexual--a teenage wrestling match with a schoolmate and a close encounter with a fellow drama student are as close as it comes to an explicit scene--it is infused with sexual tension, desire and loss. Morrison is fearlessly overt and at times archaic with his literary allusions. At one point, he meditates on a short chapter from the novel Bambi, making reference to its translation into English by HUAC witness Whittaker Chambers and tying it together with thoughts about death and repressed male eroticism. Written in a poetic style that's reminiscent of the autobiographical writings of Mark Doty (Firebird) and Bernard Cooper (Guess What?), Morrison's memoir has a freshness and rich depth that set it apart.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (March 14, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312261292
• ISBN-13: 978-0312261290
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,159,910 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "A Difficult Time of Life", April 12, 2001

By 

Joseph J. Hanssen "Joe" (Upstate New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Broken Fever: Reflections of Gay Boyhood (Hardcover)

In this collection of personal essays James Morrison writes about a very difficult time of life, boyhood. A time of coming to terms with oneself, your identity, and the process of accepting or denying who you are and the feelings that go with that. It's a very complex process and an even more difficult one when you come to realize you are gay. Growing up is a time of great discovery and this author shares his many memories of that time in his life in an intelligent and honest way. I think he's a great storyteller, and his memories brought back many memories of my own boyhood. It made me think about a lot of things I had long forgotten or buried in the back of my mind.

These essays are the best when he is just focusing on telling the stories. It's when he starts to theorize or psychoanalyze every event using language that requires me to grab my dictionary every other sentence that I really got frustrated and wanted to give up. However, he always seemed to get back on track and then I couldn't stop reading about his early boyhood memories.

I especially enjoyed "Checks and Balances" about his experience with classmate Luke and his first sexual feelings, and "Questions of Travel", that wonderful experience of "the" family vacations, which is so easy to relate to.

The moments of frustration aside, I really did enjoy this book. Probably because I could identify with so much of James boyhood and his early experiences. If you want an intellectual read, I believe this book is a true success, and very enjoyable! It brought back many memories for me and it will for you, too!

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Memoir in a Season of Catholic Homosexuality, April 19, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Broken Fever: Reflections of Gay Boyhood (Hardcover)

James Morrison writes truly of the tensions of Catholic boys spreadeagle on the crucifix of Catholicism. Something must be in the air; for Morrison's book appears amazingly at the same moment this spring as two others--similar, complementary, and of literary note--particularly for Reading Lists. One is "Escaping God's Closet: Revelations of a Queer Priest" by Bernard Duncan Mayes. "Closet" is the memoirist essay of an Anglo-Catholic priest dealing with the theology of his sexual essence in San Francisco. The other, most parallel to "Broken Fever: Reflections of Gay Boyhood" is the memoir-in-the-shape-of- a-novel, "What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy" by Jack Fritscher, who, the jacket says, is a graduate of the Pontifical College Josephinum, which, as a seminary fictionalized, represents the quintessential terror of Catholic education raised "ad absurdum" to "fever" pitch just at the moment when youthful identity emerges. Both Morrison and Fritscher keep their books "pure." Impurity in both books is masked by "wrestling" which must be the most Catholic of sports for closeted gay boys. Both are "poets"--and perhaps victims--obviously educated in the high-Catholic humanist disciplines of literature. Morrison's "Broken Fever" is to nonfiction memoir as "What They Did to the Kid" is to fictional memoir. Both these writers, specifically Catholic, specifically literate, specifically writhing and writing about a past that, thank God, no longer exists, really ought, with these two new books, to be on the same reading tour as well as on the same reading list as well as the same tranquilizers. I find the comparison and contrast between the two books rather fortuitous coincidence. Morrison's book is I think a finely precise piece that helps expose why Catholicism deservedly collapsed after Vatican II, having for so long terrified its children. Morrison's title metaphor is apt: the Catholic "fever" of the past burned up more than one boy. I know. His book brought up things I hadn't thought of in years.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Worthwhile, but uneven essays on growing up, August 16, 2001

By 

Allan Brain (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Broken Fever: Reflections of Gay Boyhood (Hardcover)

I recommend this book, but with reservations. The author is at times highly effective with a poetic style, but there are unnecessary distractions such as obscure words and complex syntax. Any writer or editor should have picked these up--and I am not talking about words that are out of the mainstream. I mean words that one can't find in the dictionary.

That is a shame because much of the book is insightful, not just about growing up "gay", whatever that means, but about family life, friends, the tensions and turmoils of adolescence, enduring such things as the trauma of moving, of being different, of being ill, of gaining and losing friends. So I think it's too bad that the author "marketed" the book to a gay readership. Its appeal is broader than that.

There is no particular "organization" such as chronological, to this collection, or if there is one intended, I did not detect its significance. I found that the more effective individual essays were those that dealt with actual experiences, such as one especially good one, "Saved", about childhood friends having diverse religious or intellectual interests and different personalities, but who seemed to be "kindred souls" (apart from any "gay" tendencies), another about the "sociology" of pets in the family, and one about a college romance (or really a friendship that should have been a romance).

All in all, a good read, but it could have been better.