A book I wish I'd read earlier in life as I struggled with many of the same issues that the author did. This is a coming out story that shows how scary and often depressing it can be dealing with society's expectations and our reactions to the various strategies it uses to try to control us. Often leading double lives, we can sometimes be forced into acting like spies - lying to ourselves and others in the process. Meanwhile the process itself often accentuates the negative aspects of being part of a minority. Also, covers the conflicts that arise when we know we are gay but fail to find anyone we're really attracted to or that is compatible sexually - which can delay things...Second half of the book a bit tedious... ( )

Found this book at an AAUW booksale and bought it on the strength of its first few pages. And it was a deal, even if only for the first half. Tobias/Reid is an engaging writer with a terrific, self-deprecating sense of humor, which comes across wonderfully. TBLBITW is, I think, an excellent primer for non-gays like me about the heartaches and difficulties of growing up gay in the 1950s and 60s - and probably before that too. Tobias conveys a real and vivid sense of just how awful it was to pretend to be straight for the first 21 years of his life, and I felt for the guy. It is his sense of humor which ultimately saves the book, and makes it eminently readable for the most part. And it was, I'm sure, that same healthy sense of humor that saved Tobias himself as he was going through all those terrible and trying years of growing up, first groping for, then finding his true sexual identity and trying to figure out how in the hell he was supposed to live. It was only the second half of the book, after he "came out" following his college years, that the narrative became rather self-absorbed and even tedious, as he gave in to his compulsion to tell all about the various couplings and sexual practices of the gay community - in NYC, Boston, Provincetown, etc in that pre-AIDS era of the 70s. I know he'd been missing all this "fun" for ten-plus years, but sometimes "TMI" can be an apt objection. So I did some skim-reading for the last 50 or 60 pages. That said, this was a better, more readable book, in many ways, than Edmund White's gay autobiography, MY LIVES. But not quite as good as FAMOUS BUILDER, by Paul Lisicky, who knew where to draw that line. So I'll recommend the first half of the book, and the second half with reservations. ( )