The best little boy in the world
Like most kids, John Reid [pseudonym for Andrew Tobias] was, to his parents, the best little boy in the world.And it seemed to him terribly important to be worthy of the title. He excelled. In sports, in schoolwork, in every extracurricular activity. And he avoided anything bad.Buried within Reid, though, was an awful awareness that long after his friends had begun to notice girls, to pursue them in earnest, be still very much preferred the kinship of boys. It took a lot of frenetic activity and constant imitations of machismoto keep that secret buried as he grew older. Above all, there could be no contact with any one effeminate; he must, in fact, be scorned. The overachiever became the superachiever, extending his record through college and into the beginnings of a successful career. Reid was twenty-three years old before he began revealing his secret--and discovered the world did not end. Relieved at last of his charade, but with his sense of proprieties still intact, he found it no small task to learn to live openly the life he had always wanted but had for so long denied himself. He knew far less about being gay than he did about being heterosexual. But he learned. Reid's is a unique story, but a universal one as well. "Being gay," except for the private matter of sexual preference, has in no way made him different from others. His boyhood, his adult life for that matter, is otherwise normal, even enviable, by almost any standard. His natural talents as storyteller and writer, his charm and wit and candor, and his affectionate recollections of family and boyhood captivate and involve the reader in this intimate chronicle of The Maturing of John Reid. --From the first-edition dust jacket (1973)