Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son: A Memoir of Growing Up, Coming Out, and Changing America's Schools [Paperback]

Kevin Jennings (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 2007

Long before Kevin Jennings began advocating to end anti-LGBT bias in schools, he was a victim of it. In Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son, Jennings traces the roots of his activism to his elementary school days in the conservative South, where "faggot" became more familiar to him than his own name. Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son is that rare memoir that is both a riveting personal story and an inside account of a critical chapter in our recent history. Creating safe schools for all youth is now a central part of the progressive agenda in American education—and Kevin Jennings is at the forefront of that fight. Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son earned an A- in Entertainment Weekly, was featured in Salon and The Advocate, and was called "a great read" by People.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

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 © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (May 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807071471
• ISBN-13: 978-0807071472
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #243,915 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very Touching Story, July 25, 2006

By 

Lester Brown (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Very few books I've read have touched me as deeply as Kevin Jenning's book "Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son." The author does an excellent job hooking the reader in with descriptions of life growing up in the South, with feelings of not being "normal."

From the depths of despair in a childhood gone wrong, Kevin managed to form an idea of how to change the climate in schools, and make them a better place for kids to learn. The things he went through as a student trying to get an education and putting up with bullying and harassment are amazing, and incredibly sad. This book should be required reading for teachers entering the field, so they understand why bullying and harassment isn't just "kids being kids" and can cause significant and lasting damage to the victims.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The teacher who enters the classroom ready to learn from his or her students has boundless capacity for growth, August 20, 2007

By 

Jessica Lux (Rosamond, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son: A Memoir of Growing Up, Coming Out, and Changing America's Schools (Paperback)

Kevin Jennings grew up as a preacher's son (the son of a Southern Baptist Minister) and a mama's boy (more interested in intellectual pursuits than athletics). This memoir is not merely the story of a homosexual boy in the Deep South living below the poverty line. Jennings's personal struggles with family and community acceptance are neither extreme nor representative of the majority. The strength of Jennings's life story lies in the experiences and incidents which led to his career as an activist. The author is able to portray the gradual development of his adult activist spirit, so far removed from the boy who lived in fear of school and his classmates.

As a reader, I especially enjoyed the story of young Kevin's black sister-in-law. His decade-older brother came back from military service with (gasp!) a black wife. They were exiled from the family and community and moved to the Northeast. Kevin had been raised to believe that the KKK, while not a part of his immediate family, did good for the whites in the South. He was ingrained with beliefs about scourge of the blacks in the South. He had extreme anxiety about visiting his brother and sister-in-law, but when he arrived at their house, he learned first-hand what a lovely woman Claudette was, and they quickly became friends and confidantes. Kevin's earliest moment of activism was introducing Claudette to all the family members at a funeral, and ensuring that they all shook her hand and talked politely with her, despite her outsider status.

Kevin Jennings was the first member of his family to go to college, but the family was disappointed that he chose a profession as un-important and un-manly a teaching. If there is one lesson from the story of Kevin Jennings, it is this: a teacher learns as much from his students as they do from him. A teacher who goes into the classroom ready to learn from his or her students has boundless capacity for growth. Jennings worked at a number of private institutions in his early career, learning from his students what level of "outness" they could accept (a lot, it turns out). He spoke up against administration policies which did not prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. He formed early Gay-Straight Alliances, describing the impetus that came directly from both gay and straight students who placed importance on such partnerships.

I highly recommend this book as high school classroom reading. Kevin Jennings has a life story with elements of poverty (classism), sexism, racism, and discrimination based on sexual orientation. These are universal issues, and his personal experiences provide a starting point for dialog about acceptance and the destruction of stereotypes.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good but strangely narrow, January 5, 2007

By 

W. M. Dix (Chicago) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son: A Memoir (Hardcover)

The post-college years, especially those at Concord Academy, are the most interesting in terms of Kevin's personal development. Having been a gay teacher at al all-boys boarding school in the 80s, I was especially involved in his narratives regarding how he gradually revealed himself to his students and then had to fight with the administration to achieve some level of recognition and comfort, a fight that ultimately failed. My own way of finally coming out was to start teaching As Is, a gay-themed play, in my theater class. Although that was a big moment for me (and one I cleared with my department head first), I found out much later, as Kevin did, that the students all pretty much knew I was gay anyway. Students really are a lot more perceptive than we give them credit for. Reading about the growth of the student gay-straight alliance and Kevin's wrestling with how to advise them will be compelling reading to any teacher, gay or straight, who has wanted to help students with their questions about sexual orientation but who have experienced their own doubts and worries about what that entails.

I sense that Kevin's book has been edited to create almost a straight line from childhood to GLSEN, as if it were somehow foreordained. It comes off as a bit artificial, a bit too trimmed of any incidents that, while they may have added something to our understanding of Kevin's personality, didn't directly lead toward where he is today. It is more reportage than memoir, and for that I'm sorry because it's clear that Kevin has done an extraordinary job as a teacher and leader. I wish I had been as courageous with my students as he was, although I like to think that in some small ways I was. It would have been worth the extra pages to have him plunge more directly into his past without arranging it too precisely to fit a predetermined outcome.

The book could have used a bit more editorial input as well. More than once Kevin relates a confrontation or tense moment with someone only to say, "I forget how he responded." It's not really fair to bring us into one's life only to leave out specifics of a climactic moment. Certainly, memory fails us all, but as the playwright says, if you show a gun in the first act, it had better go off by the third. Building up the tension of the moment only to cut it off too soon deprives us of the catharsis we need and dissipates somewhat the power of Kevin's reactions. Kevin also resorts several times to the lazy student's expression, "I was in awe" of something. Again, his editor should have prodded him to describe himself fully at those moments instead of taking the easy way out. Finally, he skips over some things that might in fact be relevant: his relationship with his first boyfriend Bob simply ends, as if he needed to get Bob offstage no matter how, and his current husband Jeff just seems to appear at the right moment, without the usual romantic introductions. And we learn incidentally that somewhere during all this time Kevin's earned an MBA, but from where we have no idea (much less can we figure out where he got the time to do that.)

On the surface, Mama's Boy tells a good straightforward story about a young gay man who overcame many obstacles to become the head of a major national organization dedicated to promoting awareness and understanding of gay and lesbian students in schools. It has grown from the proverbial card table in the living room to a powerful positive force in education. Ultimately, though, the book is less memoir than founding document; it tells us less about the man who wrote it than it does about the head of the organization. It's closer in spirit to some CEOs' memoirs than to genuine autobiography. Those of us who have experienced even a small part of Kevin's struggle will appreciate his forthrightness but ultimately, one wishes the person, more than the image, were better revealed.