Mama’s Boy: A Story from Our Americas

A gay man and his disabled, homophobic mother bond despite their differences in this sometimes overwrought, sometimes luminous memoir. Black, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Milk, centers his life story on his mother, Anne, a Louisiana share-cropper’s daughter whose legs were paralyzed by polio when she was two; thanks to her dogged work ethic and stoicism, she defied doctors’ predictions by learning to walk on crutches and bearing three children, weathered abusive husbands, and became a laboratory supervisor. Black’s emotional attachment to his mother was deep, but their membership in the Mormon Church made him hide his homosexuality from her; going on to film school, Hollywood, and marriage-equality activism, he worried that the gulf between him and his conservative clan might be unbridgeable. Black devotes much space to tremulous fretting over his blue-on-red coming-out saga, but the results are not very dramatic: his family—even the Texarkana Baptist branch—takes the revelation well, and Anne, despite a few previous homophobic comments, is soon socializing with his gay friends. (Black’s bigger problem is with gay moderates who wanted to slow-walk the marriage movement.) But the book shines in its portrait of the vibrant, indomitable Anne trudging determinedly over every obstacle, and in intimate scenes of everyday family heartaches and triumphs against the odds. Photos. (May)