THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 12, 1996 TAG: 9605130182
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
NOT LIKE OTHER BOYS
Growing Up Gay: A Mother and Son Look Back
MARLENE FANTA SHYER AND CHRISTOPHER SHYER
Houghton Mifflin. 259 pp. $21.95.
It was in a New Rochelle, N.Y., kindergarten classroom in 1966 that Marlene Fanta Shyer first said the words out loud.
``I've been worried about Chris,'' she told her 5-year-old son's teacher. ``I'm afraid he may grow up to be a homosexual.''
She had no solid evidence - just intuition. The teacher promised to watch but saw nothing.
So what if Chris preferred setting the table to playing with trucks and building blocks, the mother rationalized. ``So maybe he'll open a restaurant,'' the boy's father suggested, unfazed.
It would be more than 20 years before Chris admitted to his parents that he was gay. And it is the anguish of those two decades that fuels the Shyers' book.
What Marlene Shyer and her son Chris have done in Not Like Other Boys, Growing Up Gay: A Mother and Son Look Back is brilliant and courageous. In alternating voices they tell parallel stories of keeping the secret. It is a daring work born of pain and tears. In its raw honesty and detail lies its power.
In co-authoring the book, Marlene agonized over her failure to ask her son at various ages if he thought he might be homosexual.
She writes: ``Now, when I allow myself to imagine how that question - followed by an assurance that being gay was fine with us, his parents - would have saved my son fifteen years of desolation, assuaged a childhood and adolescence of torment and freed him from the pathology of self-hatred, I become distraught to the point of tears. This book is my confession, a tract and a briefing all in one. And it is, above all, an apology to my son.''
For Chris, the book is his gift to others: ``I am not telling my story to get pity, but to shorten the distance between acknowledgment and self-confidence in others like me . . . Am I capable of opening parents' eyes and softening their hearts? I am writing this with that fervent hope.''
Marlene Shyer has published three novels, 10 children's books and more than 100 stories and essays in major women's magazines. Christopher Shyer graduated from the University of Vermont and earned a master's in business administration from Columbia University. He is a business executive in New York.
Their story is also one of a privileged suburban life of Swiss ski vacations and private schools, of country clubs and summer camps. It is about a marriage that unravels, and a mother clinging to hope, grasping at explanations offered by psychotherapists. It's about the homophobia that pervades our society.
For Chris, the sense that he was different from other boys came early and with a relentless intensity.
``Feeling that you don't fit in comes in many shapes and sizes . . . but waking up one morning having the wrong sexual orientation has to be among the worst. The sense of having a tainted soul, of being in some way sordid, deviant and dirty, is the deepest and most tearing shame possible. . . . I felt for boys what I should have been feeling for girls: the flutter in the stomach, the tension, the urge and the pull. For me, it was a war I waged against myself for most of my life, a war I know now that I was destined to lose.''
A coming-of-age tale with a twist, Not Like Other Boys delves into the deception of ``passing'' for heterosexual and the price that must be paid. It looks at the slurs that pollute everyday conversations.
``When the insult is subtle and is spoken quietly in polite company, it drills the deepest,'' Chris writes.
This mother-son memoir has it all. It's a thought-provoking, psychological drama. MEMO: June Arney is a staff writer. by CNB