Books Gay Kid Makes Good by D.L. Groover How I Learned to Snap by Kirk Read Hill Street Press

Take a very hip postmodern Holden Caulfield, add a liberal dash of gay Tabasco, sprinkle with Gen-X cool and a true artist’s ability to tell his story without excess, and you might get Kirk Read’s mighty fine How I Learned to Snap.

While coming-of-age/coming-out stories are fairly standard fare, perhaps even old hat, it all depends upon the teller. Thank goodness we have sassy, savvy Mr. Read to relate his usually hilarious take on his early life and times.

Raised in redneck football-loving Lexington, Virginia, Read nimbly picks through the ups and downs of a gay boy light-years ahead of his class, making the journey from sensitive kid taunted in elementary school with "faggot" and "butt pirate," into a wise, almost all-knowing teen who knew just what he wanted. Youngest of his siblings, he’s fortunate to have had older parents whose parenting skills had lapsed with fatigue into loving laissez-faire: "the cub of exhausted lions," he quips in one of the many aptly turned phrases that pepper his memoir.

In sixth grade he’s prowling the video arcade in hopes of being groped by the greasy manager. After weeks in which he becomes extremely proficient in Frogger and PacMan, he tires of waiting for his diddle. "I couldn’t even get molested in this town," he whines. Read smokes and drinks his way through school, writes poems to favorite male teachers, assiduously keeps his ubiquitous diary, fights needed battles and bullies. "Boys love hitting each other in the face. I guess it’s the next best thing to a kiss," he wisely notes.

He gets to throw a newspaper through Pat Robertson’s front window (he grew up in Lexington, too), and becomes enamored of the theater’s magic at an early age. He witnesses the outsider’s feisty dignity in his openly gay friend Jesse, buys porn magazines on the sly in a neighboring city, and has sex (finally!) with his much older friend Rich.

Growing up, Read was always ahead of the curve. The love of his formative years–Walker–was an adult; their illegal affair, sanctioned by his mother, focuses his life and cements his career in writing. The two meet in Richmond, where Read attends a summer playwriting course before his high school senior year. It’s the grounding he needs. The relationship completes him, bringing both heartbreak and joy. His flip attitude levels out. He keeps growing.

This brief book, elegantly phrased, written in short-story chapters, captures all the free spirit, the weird angst, the sexual shenanigans, the nonjudgmental opened-eyed reality of gay youth. Read was never bashed, he never hid, never had his parents disown him, never contemplated suicide. "I was lucky," he admits in the epilogue. "I got through high school without the all-too-common horrors of many LGBT young people–the trick is navigating that world in a way that preserves both one’s voice and one’s safety."