PERFORMANCE ANXIETY: The Headlong Adolescence of a Mid-Century Kid
It was the school year 1964-65. I was sixteen turning seventeen: smart but insecure, desperate to be an adult, acting like I already was one, and terrified at the prospect.
I got my first car, and drove as if the new Interstate Highways were being laid down just for me. Drawn to Black culture and the civil rights movement, I took the first steps on an activist path that in a few years would see me helping found the militant Weather Underground. I was having sex with girls in order to obscure the unmentionable fact that I am gay. My father was checked out while my mother was dying, and that's another thing that couldn't be discussed.
Here are the placid surfaces and hidden undercurrents, the giddiness and misery, in the life of an affluent, suburban teenager—and in American culture—during the period just before the tumult that has come to be signified by "the sixties."
Get it from Bookshop.org. Better yet, ask at your favorite bookstore. They can order it, and will be glad you called it to their attention. (And so will I.)
"Performance Anxiety is a rich, textured account of Jonathan Lerner's journey through the complexities of adolescence and early adulthood. With unflinching honesty, Lerner explores his struggles with sexual identity, self-discovery, and the pressures of conformity in a world that feels both exhilarating and unforgiving."
ERIC CERVINI, author of The Deviant's War:
The Homosexual vs. The United States of America
"Jonathan Lerner's deceptively breezy memoir roots around in his peripatetic childhood not just for the sake of telling colorful, funny stories but in search of truth, accuracy, and in some cases self-forgiveness. He is excruciatingly candid about the self-torture queer boys undergo in their effort to live up to some flimsy concept of acceptable masculinity. Along the way he investigates the peculiar phenomenon of memory, seemingly concrete and yet surprisingly malleable to time, shame, and distance."
DON SHEWEY, author of Daddy Lover God: A Sacred Intimate Journey
Me at sixteen. I had just put aside the New Yorker to read the funny pages in the Washington Post.