What can a child make of a small-town culture in which love is a given, but intimacy is deemed sinful? What does a shy adult do when he finds out his great-grandmother ran a bordello? How does a stubborn individual resist labels and remain the “gentleman” he was raised to be? Growing up gay and Catholic in the state of Kentucky in the mid-twentieth century, author and Broadway performer Kevin Lane Dearinger was puzzled by what he heard about sex: the sneers, lies, misrepresentations, distortions, guilt, and secrecy. Some of his experiences were traumatic, but most just contributed to a life-saving sense of the absurd. The natural was made unnatural by gossip and judgment, fear and cruelty, and sex was “bad” in Kentucky, but language, humor, and time have provided protection and perspective. Bad Sex in Kentucky is about seeking grace under pressure, even at the risk of a pratfall. It is about place, family, and heritage. It is about survival at a price and a kind of ferocious forgiveness. It is about the search for identity within the tangled intersection of sex and love.

Review

Broadway performer, gifted playwright, esteemed academician, Kevin Lane Dearinger conquers new heights in Bad Sex in Kentucky, his droll, keenly observed first person account of growing up gay in the Bluegrass State before the gay rights era. A matchless memoirist whose disclosures range from the hilarious to the harrowing, Dearinger chronicles his rich family history as a proud Kentuckian, as well as his experiences growing up "different" in an intolerant time. From his earliest memories to painful adolescence to assured adulthood, his stories, rendered with virtuosic specificity and the sharp wit of an unbowed survivor, shine a bright light onto an unfortunately not-so-bygone time. --F. Kathleen Foley, Drama Critic, Los Angeles Times

Dearinger reminds us why Kentuckians are such noted, sometimes notorious, storytellers. Giving a visceral sense of time and place, Bad Sex in Kentucky is, at times snortingly funny, at times poignantly sad. Dearinger's work is honest, friendly, and intimate. --Dr. Jonathan Coleman, Faulkner Morgan Archives

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