Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land by Taylor Brorby

Abstract

Reviewed by: Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land by Taylor Brorby O. Alan Weltzien and emeritus Taylor Brorby, Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land. New York: Liveright Publishing. 335 pp. Hardcover, $27.95. Montana novelist Thomas Savage, a gay man heterosexually married, threw his overtly gay novel manuscript into the Atlantic (ca. 1964) when his literary agent advised him it couldn’t be published let alone widely read. As we all know by now, his character, repressed gay Phil Burbank (The Power of the Dog), who contains strands of Savage, meets a painful death as he tries to come out again. In his friend Annie Proulx’s best-known short story, “Broke-back Mountain,” Ennis angrily asks his lover, “This happen a other people? What the hell do they do?” and Jack responds, “It don’t happen in Wyoming and if it does I don’t know what they do, maybe go to Denver.” As you might remember, a year after this short story was published, Matthew Shepard, a Wyomingite, didn’t make it that far. Even now, how much safe space exists for sexual minorities in the rural West away from the coastal region? That question arguably represents the central prompt behind Taylor Brorby’s beautifully written memoir. He reminds us that it’s unsafe, outside some urban precincts, for a man to hold another man in public. Brorby’s story shows him inexorably torn between his western North Dakota home and exile. He insistently and lyrically paints his native topography in the country’s least visited state. He’s a poet of a landscape few of us know let alone cherish, and his love runs deep. At the same time, as his title and subtitle clarify, this memoir tells an all-too-familiar story of environmental degradation and destruction, of callous extractive industries that strip-mine surfaces, gouge the depths, and leave scarred ground that’s the short-grass prairie equivalent of Pacific Northwest clear-cutting. He knows the Bakken oil patch and the Dakota Access Pipeline personally and painfully, as his anthology Fracture (2016) attests. He records his Iowa arrest for protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline (260–61), about which he’s written elsewhere. Brorby knows fracking means fucking the ground beneath: yet another example of Rob Nixon’s slow violence. North Dakota means [End Page 80] a horizontal place defined by a five-hundred-foot smokestack and a dragline and endless derricks; it is a “story of self-destruction. Everything leaves North Dakota full and comes back empty. The only way I’ve understood my home is by getting out, escaping its crushing weight, watching the destruction, now from the outside” (7). Our endless pursuit of oil leaves only wreckage in its wake—no new news—and the kind of boys (and girls) drawn to oil patches pose direct threats to the Native boy who, by adolescence, in familiar fashion, discovers himself a sexual minority subject to insult, ostracism, and worse. Brorby begins, “Center [North Dakota] is a place where people only end up” (5). His memoir makes a strong case for escape. He’s escaped to Bismarck by high school and St. Olaf’s College then the Twin Cities as he struggles through identity formation. It’s the old American story of getting the hell out of Dodge particularly if one doesn’t conform to local majority preferences, including heterosexuality. Brorby lives through extensive pain and seasons of tears as he negotiates his emerging self between his roots, his family and place, and new, more tolerant and cosmopolitan geographies. What a courageous story of redefining what and where one belongs. The most painful part of Brorby’s story concerns his parents who provided him and his older sister a range of creature comfort but who turned their backs when he came out to them. In such a memoir, coming out, unsurprisingly, forms a main theme and Brorby sketches several scenes in which his older sister, his grandfathers, and ultimately his two older nephews, affirm him and their unqualified love. Those embraces make his parents’ silent hostility all the more excruciating (they’ve not spoken in years). The...