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."
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"Lerner uses an uncanny memory of things past plus relentless insight to reconstruct a mid-century America brimming with confidence, haunted by the ghosts of racism, and poised for big change. Performance Anxiety is smart, moving, tender, funny, tense, and deeply resonant."
JEREMY VARON, co-editor, The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture
"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
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Me at sixteen. I had just put aside the New Yorker to read the funny pages in the Washington Post.