Title: Under the Rainbow - Growing Up Gay Author: Arnie Kantrowitz Published by: Morrow, 1977 ISBN: 0-688-03191-9 [hardcover, 255 pages]
This time the "nice Jewish boy" with the difficult parents ("Freudian classics," he calls them) turns out to be gay.Under the Rainbow is Arnie Kantrowitz's own story, from his early recognition of his sexual predilection, through his coming out of the closet many agonized years later, to his finally becoming a nationally prominent gay activist and spokesman (in which guise he appeared on the Jack Paar show; as a result of his appearance his family disinvited him to their Passover seder, and his uncle declared him dead).
He leaves nothing out. The attempts to love women and the pain of confession to those women who love him. The attempts at suicide ("they took away my eyeglasses for fear I would break them and try to cut my wrists"). The sex: cruising, the baths, Fire Island, the orgies. The politics. Life on a gay commune. And the gay history of the gay times, history both missed and grasped.
While the book focuses on the gay experience, it deals with its author's whole self -- ethnic, psychological, educational, spiritual, as well as sexual. Under the Rainbow is a book written with wit, intelligence, and a vast amount of good feeling.
Arnie Kantrowitz was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1940. He received his B.A. from Rutgers and his M.A. from New York University. He is a former Vice President of Gay Activists Alliance and since 1965 has been an Assistant Professor of English at the College of Staten Island. He lives in New York City.
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