MAMA’S BOY, PREACHER’S SON - A MEMOIR | buy
Special Offer - 10% Discount & Free Shipping @ Beacon:
Beacon Press is offering free shipping & a 10% discount on GLSEN Founder and Executive Director Kevin Jennings’ new memoir, Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son. A portion of the proceeds from this offer will be donated to support GLSEN’s safe schools work.
A moving account of Kevin’s life journey from the trailer parks of North Carolina to meetings in the White House, Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son weaves humor, drama and insight into the story of one man determined to protect future generations of students from the bullying and harassment all too common in his own life. Andrew Holleran calls it “a moving, extremely readable account of an amazing American life. Halfway between Bastard Out of Carolina and Dead Poets Society.”
To take advantage of this offer and support GLSEN:
- visit the Beacon Press website
- click on “Add to Cart.”
- In the checkout page, simply enter “GLSEN” as the discount code and you’ll receive free shipping and a 10% discount on Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son and any other book on the site.
Best of all, a portion of the proceeds generated through this offer will benefit GLSEN’s work to ensure safe schools for all students, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression.
About the book:
When he was just a junior high school boy first getting involved in community politics, Kevin Jennings’ local paper, the Winston-Salem Journal, wrote that he could “cause more frothing and fulmination with one letter to the editor than can a rabies epidemic.” Jennings would go on to use his talent for political agitation to lead one of the critical social justice movements of the last decade, ultimately establishing a widely influential education organization focused on creating safe schools for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students.
Now, in his memoir Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son, Jennings traces his activist roots to his childhood in the conservative South, where he grew up in trailer parks, the son of a fundamentalist evangelist father, who died when Jennings was eight, and an Appalachia-born mother, who managed to raise Jennings and his four older siblings on what she could earn with a sixth grade education. Noting that his family held the typical attitudes of poor white Southerners of their time, Jennings recalls festooning his room and the family car with the Confederate flag, and remembers that his first political heroes were segregationist governor George Wallace and the Klu Klux Klan. “We saw the battle over integration as a replay of the Civil War,” he observes, “of Yankees once again invading our homeland, foisting their alien ideas upon us, using their superior force to compel us to do something profoundly wrong. I hated them for it.”
Jennings stopped buying into the racial divide after learning to adore his oldest brother’s African- American wife, who had initially caused their family so much shame. He recalls starting to recognize society’s inequities, observing how sexism affected his mother’s ability to make a fair living, while also being both buoyed and dammed by his Southern Baptist upbringing, which extolled suffering for the truth, but excoriated people who are gay.
Jennings found his salvation instead in school. Writing of the unstinting love and support of his mother, he tells how, through her impressive math ability, her shared fascination with the Civil War, and her love of books and reading, she instilled in her son an early love of learning. In school, though, Jennings was relentlessly picked on and bullied. He tells of being called “sissy” and “faggot,” being the daily target of spitballs and taunts on the bus, the object of derision in the classroom, and being openly humiliated by teachers. Indeed, none of the teachers or other adults in his school environment ever protected him or offered their support.
Escaping via a scholarship to Harvard (becoming the first member of his extended family to attend college as a result), where he finally came out, and then answering a calling to teach, Jennings relives his bitter struggles–with administrators as well as with himself–over how to be an openly gay high school teacher.
It was as a teacher that Jennings would start making changes for LGBT students–and it was his students, he says, that led him into action. After he came out during a school assembly speech, Jennings was shocked and moved by the support he received from the student body. “In the end,” he writes, “I was the one who had the biggest problem with gay people, beginning with myself.” Following his coming out, Jennings was approached by one of the most popular girls in school. Her mother was a lesbian, she reported, and she wanted to combat homophobia at the school by starting one of the first school-based Gay-Straight Alliances. The work that began at his school spread, with the state’s Governor creating a commission to study the experiences of LGBT youth, which led to public hearings in Massachusetts in which gay students testified about how the adults in their lives–in school, in their families, in the government–failed to keep them safe and led some to attempt suicide. “It wasn’t unusual,” Jennings remembers of that time, “to see people crying, sometimes having to excuse themselves because they couldn’t sit and listen anymore. With each hearing I could also feel a hardening resolve, born of outrage and anger, that we simply were not going to let this continue, that we could use our platform to demand real change.”
Having touched a nerve, Jennings left teaching and founded GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. He has spent the last twelve years building GLSEN into a national organization at the forefront of a bold movement that now works with over 3,000 Gay-Straight Alliances in schools across the country.
Ultimately, he credits his mother for teaching him about the fight for justice. Alice Johnson Jennings went through her own growth process that paralleled that of her son’s. Although raised with homophobia, she founded a local chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays in the late Eighties. Raised in segregation, she would become a full-time volunteer helping black men at an AIDS hospice. “When my faith flags,” he writes, “when my soul is weary, when I feel I am too tired to go on with the struggle for justice, I picture my seventy-five year old mother holding the hands of a seventy-pound African-American man with AIDS as he passes from this life to the next, and I am restored.”