Tightfisted Heart

”…everybody suspected what kind of kid 1 was. The other boys on my block had me pegged. 1 was a sissy, a fairy, a faggot. They didn’t say that—at least not until later. But they knew…” This is the story of that boy—a boy who is attracted to other boys—and his coming of age in the tumultuous 6os. A young man determined to become the person he knows he is meant to be, David is independent, principled, gay. In this honest, heartbreaking, and at times funny memoir we follow David as he, in his quiet way, rejects a church that condemns him; resists a country’s readiness to send him to fight in a war he opposes, and stands up to a tyrannical father who controls him with a hard fist and an iron will. Tightfisted Heart tells the tender yet courageous tale of that journey, one that in the end brings our narrator to a hard-won acceptance of his sexuality, and an unexpected peace with his dying father.