This book, The Truth About Alex, was originally entitled ‘Counterplay’ and has since been made into a film by HBO starring Scott Baio. The story is about an adolescent growing up in a pressured society, with a domineering absentee father and a placating mother. It is about his development, about how he deals with his “best” friend’s gayness and other people’s inability to handle the situation. Counterplay, or The Truth About Alex, tells the story of Alex Prager, a high school student who is inadvertently outed as gay and the difficulty his best friend Brad has in coming to terms with it.
The story is supportive, teenage reading, and it would be pleasant if life treated everyone this way.
Information:
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Language: English
ISBN: 0451149963
ISBN13: 9780451149961
Release Date: February 1987
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Links:
- YouTube – The Truth About Alex Scott Baio (1986) HBO Full Show
- IMDB – The Truth About Alex
- Torch Song Trilogy
- ABC After School Special in 1972.
In September 1989, Torch Song Trilogy had just ended its run at the Queen’s Film Theatre. It was well worth going to pains to see it. Indeed, if you haven’t seen it yet, then do make an effort either on DVD, one of the streaming media or if it ever returns to the cinema theatres. The lead, Harvey Fierstein, also wrote the original stage play and the screenplay. The theatrical origins of the piece are quite obvious but not intrusive – except at one point.
Sitting through Carrington I wished that I was at Braveheart, I did not quite think the opposite at Braveheart. Mel Gibson is going to have to face the fact that dallying with women in their twenties is beginning to look dubious in a man who’ll soon be a grandfather.
I found Night Kites in the teenage fiction section of a local mobile library. It was the very pleasant cover design that caught my eye and then the blurb which mentions AIDS.
Kinderkill brings into print the subject of “snuff” movies, and the related topics of child sex fanatics. The characters whether cops or child molesters are stereotypes, of no real depth or interest. The story development is progressive, with one or two hiccups due to the author’s attempts to assign qualities to his characters that are not necessary to the story. Indeed the author’s preoccupation with having clear black and white characters gives the book an unreal quality.
Who Lies Inside by Timothy Ireland, deals with a young man’s struggle to come to terms with his sexual attraction to other men. Martin Conway comes from a typical English working-class family in which any manifestation of emotion meets with rental disapproval. Martin or “Jumbo”, is a rugby player, and a wimp, and an 18 year old sixth former. He becomes increasingly alienated from his parents and from his straight friends, and, despite his initial unwillingness to confront the ‘stranger’ inside him he eventually decides that the ‘stranger’, i.e. his gayness, must ‘step out into the light and be seen’, if he is to be truly happy.
Kinsella’s Overisght by Tommy Dwyer is a riposte to ‘Butcher’s Dozen’, a poem written by the Eire establishment poet Thomas Kinsella. It commemorated the thirteen people killed by the Para at a pur4ely peaceful demonstration in January 1972, organized by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in Derry City, against the continuation of internment without trial. As the introduction says, “If the poem also commemorated the innocent Protestant dead, and worked up emotions against the political process which killed them, it would be as useful a contribution to the cause of progress as a bourgeois poet could make in this day and age.” Kinsella abuses the Ulster Protestant as Britains … ‘rubbish … slaps and scraps …,’ and works up purely Nationalist hatred for the ‘Brits’ and especially the Ulster Protestant community. Despite this Kinsella says “They, even they, with other nations have a place”.
‘Jack Robinson’ is a pseudonym, I assume, though given the sweep fo ‘Teardrops On My Drum’, anything is likely, parts of it are so unlikely they must be true! It chronicles the life of a Liverpool slummie from 5 to 15, when he joins the Army. The BA in the 20s seems to have been very gay.
Arrangement 92019) starts off with a character in the shadows texting – with a musical song sung by Garth Ross (My Time Is Your Time) playing in the background indistinctly. The first verse of the song sets up the story in a number of ways:
Though our copy of the Boys on the Rock by John Fox is a proof copy, I could find very little that was in need of correction; except for the basis of the story.