Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land by Taylor Brorby (review)

Reviewed by: Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land by Taylor Brorby Clare Forstie Taylor Brorby, Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land. New York, NY: Liveright, 2022. 352 pp. 27. 95 (hardcover). In his alternately beautiful and painful memoir, Taylor Brorby chronicles his trajectory as a young, gay man across a range of Midwestern landscapes both ecological and human, finding, losing, and finding community and support along the way. Family remains a source of both support and loss, and Brorby returns frequently to themes of home, community, and grief for lost people and lost landscapes. Brorby's narrative is unique in its synthesis of queer memoir and environmentalism, and his focus on the relationship between people and Midwestern fossil fuel industries illustrates how the human and ecological are inevitably intertwined. At first glance, Brorby's story might seem an easy narrative for outsiders to read, nodding their heads along at the oppressive landscapes of the Midwest under social and environmental pressures. Brorby initially frames the settled prairie as the rotting, festering heart (17) of the continent and highlights the harm working-class masculinity wreaks on the land and on families. Although readers might be tempted to review this book through a dystopic lens, a close read of Brorby's narrative reveals multiple complex themes that make this book a productively nuanced story. Those themes include a focus on the Midwest as a geographically and culturally diverse landscape, an examination of multiple masculinities rooted in local and regional contexts, an exploration of queer communities even in spaces of fear and risk, and an analysis of the multiple ways families enable and limit the lives of queer folks. Outsiders often view the Midwest as a monolithic landscape, but Brorby's memoir emphasizes in beautiful detail the local specificity of a small midwestern community, which he then contrasts with midwestern small and mid-sized cities. Beginning in Center, North Dakota, a small town with just under 600 residents, Brorby's family moves to Bismarck, a small city of about 75, 000. Brorby highlights the ways this transition is meaningful to his growing gay identity, even as each community has its limitations. Brorby's migration to St. Olaf College, then briefly to the east coast, then back to the Midwest highlights the ecological and social landscapes that make these places unique, and uniquely Midwestern. Indeed, migration (and what enables and constrains it) remains a key theme across Brorby's memoir, as he shares the experience of "getting out" versus "being trapped" (316) in his midwestern hometowns. These migrations occur as historical forces like the End Page 232 Bakken oil boom, the Dakota Access Pipeline resistance movements, and the changing LGBTQ policy landscape are inscribed quite literally on the ground and the people that shape these communities. Brorby's memoir is also a story of rural, implicitly white, masculinity, in which gender norms are oppressive for young boys who step outside of them. As C. J. Pascoe (2011) has demonstrated, homophobia is essential in maintaining the kind of working-class white masculinity exemplified by grandfathers, fathers, and sons, oil workers, friends, and strangers alike. But as Brorby's experience reveals, the story of masculinity is complex, and multiple masculinities are possible, if punished, in these spaces. There is space, for example, for a love of nature, even as the natural landscape remains colonized and at risk from environmental and economic exploitation. Yet conformity to local norms of masculinity is enforced to such an extent that physical safety is elusive for those who step too far beyond its boundaries, even in small cities like Bismarck. (76) Brorby explains and exhibits these pressures as he navigates a complex sense of masculinity that values and seeks to hide his North Dakota roots. Rural, white masculinity runs deep in Brorby's experience, at times a source of strength and at other times a source of oppression. Essential to Brorby's narrative, and to the Midwest more broadly, is queer community and the varied ways it is experienced and expressed. In line with scholarship on rural queer lives, such as Mary L. Gray's Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility. . .