Mama's Boy: A Memoir

About this book

To outsiders my mom and I should have been enemies. Our house should have been divided -- North vs South red vs blue conservative vs progressive or however you want to put it. Instead my mom and I fuelled each other. Her oil lit my lamp and eventually mine lit hers. The tools Id learned to wield growing up in her conservative Christian southern military home were the same Id used to wage battles that had taken me from a broken-down welfare apartment where gunfire sang me to sleep to the biggest stages in the world and to the front row of the United States Supreme Court to fight for LGBTQ equality. Dustin Lance Black wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for Milk and helped overturn Californias anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 but he grew up in a conservative Mormon household outside San Antonio Texas. His mother Anne was raised in rural Louisiana and contracted polio when she was two years old. She endured brutal surgeries as well as braces and crutches for life and was told that she would never have children or a family. Willfully defying expectations she found salvation in an unlikely faith raised three sons and escaped the abuse and violence of two questionably devised Mormon marriages before finding love and an improbable career in the U.S. civil service. When Lance came out to his mother at twenty-one he was already studying the arts instead of going on his Mormon mission. She derided his sexuality as a sinful choice and was terrified for his future. Mamas Boy explores what it took to remain a family despite such division-a journey that stretched from the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court to the woodsheds of East Texas. In the end the rifts that have split a nation couldnt end this relationship that defined and inspired their remarkable lives. Mamas Boy is their story. Its a story of the noble quest for a plane higher than politics - one of family foundations turmoil tragedy elation and love. It is a story needed now more than ever.