Widescreen Dreams: Growing Up Gay at the Movies (Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies, Joan Larkin and David Bergman, Series Editors)

In 1973, a sweet-tempered, ferociously imaginative ten-year-old boy named Patrick Horrigan saw the TV premiere of the film version of Hello, Dolly! starring Barbra Streisand. His life would never be the same. Widescreen Dreams: Growing Up Gay at the Movies traces Horrigan’s development from childhood to gay male adulthood through a series of visceral encounters with an unexpected handful of Hollywood movies from the 1960s and 1970s: Hello Dolly!, The Sound of Music, The Poseidon Adventure, Dog Day Afternoon , and The Wiz. Describing his favorite movies as if they told the story of his own life, Patrick Horrigan turns popular culture upside down and inside out. He tunnels back into the long, lazy afternoons of his conservative Catholic upbringing in suburban Pennsylvania where the movies offered salvation from boredom and self-loathing; he re-creates in loving, unembarrassed detail his turbulent relationship with his mother, the first and most important in a series of strong women, both real and cinematic, who goaded him toward self-awareness; and he dramatizes his adolescent escape, both in fact and in celluloid fantasy, to the greatest, gayest city on earth, the Emerald City of daydreams, New York In 1973, a sweet-tempered, ferociously imaginative ten-year-old boy named Patrick Horrigan saw the TV premiere of the film version of Hello, Dolly! starring Barbra Streisand. His life would never be the same. Widescreen Dreams: Growing Up Gay at the Movies traces Patrick's development from childhood to gay male adulthood as a series of encounters, sometimes mournful, sometimes hysterically funny, with an unexpected handful of Hollywood movies from the 1960s and 1970s The coming out story of a ""generation Xer"" who came of age in the 1970s. From the age of ten, when author Horrigan first saw ""Hello, Dolly!"" his life was changed. Focusing on five films, his story offers an exploration of what it means to be young and gay in the movie palace of American culture. The author describes the impact of five films on his life and explains how they shaped his sense of himself as a gay man