Below is a NEW review from the GAY & LESBIAN REVIEW. The G&L Review is a big deal for us LGBTQ writers, so I’m quite thrilled. (One quibble: my sibs and I were paid for working in the motel – so we were not “free” labor as the writer says. ‘Cheap,’ yes, but not free.)

Get Out (but not yet)

By DANIEL BURR

STONE MOTEL
Memoirs of a Cajun Boy
by Morris Ardoin
University Press of Mississippi. 255 pages, $28.

THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD Morris Ardoin likes to cook and play canasta. He hates sleeping on the ground in a tent, cannot kill an animal with a gun, and dreads hunting trips with his father and older brother. He notices the things that can make life “magical”: a dining room chandelier, translucent plastic curtains with flowers printed on them, the smell of lavender in a dresser drawer. From a young age, Morris is aware that he is not a “proper boy.” For someone growing up in a small town in Louisiana in the early 1970s, this is a problem. Stone Motel is a memoir that reveals what it was like for a gay man to come of age before the changes wrought by Stonewall reached the American South.

To continue reading this article, please LOGIN or SUBSCRIBE