Reading "Broken Fever," a collection of thoughtful, soothing and smart essays, is like having a new gay friend over for tea, for the kind of leisurely rainy afternoon chat where boyhood memories are compared and coming out accounts are contrasted. It's a charming book, comforting and just a little bit provocative, easy to like and welcome to stay in the collection for subsequent visits.
It's the work of North Carolina English teacher James Morrison, whose early years, from his own account, were happy ones. The intent of his chronicle isn't to recount harrowing times of thrashing personal confusion and thuggish parental abuse, so often the motif of autobiographical trips down memory lane. Rather, it's to explore the process by which one little queer came to realize who he was and what he wanted -- to engage and explain the process of sexual and emotional self-discovery by which a grounded, healthy, even contented gay self-identity emerges.
In so doing, Morrison pinpoints sensory moments from his early life -- a first crush, the grade school classmate who wanted to wrestle with him, the truth that the boy he was and the Catholicism he was born into were not a good fit, the junior high attraction to drama class -- which in retrospect taught him he was "gay" well before he had a language to articulate the lesson, and which posits, with forceful grace, the notion that, yes, there are gay children. It's a refreshing declaration.
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