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."

COMING SOON FROM WIPF & STOCK PUBLISHERS