Thursday's Child

THUSDAY''S CHILD is a deeply personal and often painful account of growing up gay in a small town in rural Maryland in the middle of the 20th Century, and the influence of this past on the author''s later life. After two life-altering events, he realizes at fourty-four that he''s confused about the nature of love and enters psychotherapy where his life story is told in actual sessions between him and his therapist. This story includes many of the issues gay men of this period were forced to face: the realization that he could never have what he calls "a normal life;" the trauma of coming out to friends, familly and business associates; the stigma of a disgraceful discharge from the US Army even after successful completion of two highly skilled and classified specialties; the anguish over the break-up of an early affair of the most abandoned type; and the resultant reluctance and struggle to ever risk intimacy again.