Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son
Kevin Jennings’ life sounds like a Lifetime movie. If his memoir Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son were a novel, then this tale of growing up gay, poor, and Southern Baptist would be too fantastic to believe - its obstacles insurmountable, its finale incredible. Instead, Jennings’ own story is an inspiring tale of the steps of a nation towards tolerance, from a man who helped trace the path.
Jennings, the founder and executive director of GLSEN (the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network) didn’t set out to be an educational activist or a spokesman for gays and lesbians in the classroom. As Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son reveals, at times painfully, all Jennings wanted as a boy was to be left alone - by his brothers, by his classmates, even by God. How that retiring kid became a national figure is the text of the book, and a powerful story delivered easily through Jennings’ self-deprecating stories.
Jennings grew up nomadic, between his father’s church postings and, later, to where his mother could find work. His dad’s depiction of an omnipotent and vengeful God in his sermons and his teasing brothers taught Jennings from an early age that his errors would never stay hidden. Despite near daily torment in high school, he was able to work hard enough to be admitted to Harvard University, but he worked just as hard to hide from his high school classmates and his family that he might be gay.
Even when he got to Harvard and was able to come out of the closet, Jennings had no intention of ever re-entering the classrooms that tortured him in his youth, fraught as they were. But his temporary stopover as a high school history teacher in Providence, Rhode Island convinced him that teachers and students like him shouldn’t have to suffer alone. While most high schools encouraged teachers to bring spouses to their events and threw expensive proms, gay and lesbian students and teachers were forced to downplay their own private lives. That sense of injustice led Jennings from one impassioned speech at exclusive prep school Concord Academy to founding and leading a series of nonprofits dedicated to fighting for LGBT rights in the classroom. Along the way, he weathered challenges both serious and hilarious, from fighting school administrators for a pay raise over a school’s disapproval to correcting a student who thought "gay" meant "hermaphrodite."
Jennings may have come to terms with his father’s beliefs, but Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son is primarily a paean to his mother, a woman who never finished high school but who supported her family alone after her husband had a fatal heart attack, and who went from denying her own son’s sexual preference to volunteering at a home for lower-income adults with AIDS. Not that his narrative requires such a strong character; Jennings’ own modest descriptors carry Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son, even if his own story might have faltered. His mother is no longer around, but she would have been proud of this uplifting book.
by Kevin Jennings
Beacon Press/ 267pp./ Hardcover, $24.95
