Book Review: Born This Way

The Born This Way blog has now been turned into a book made up of the stories submitted by readers who were all evidently LGBTQ from an early age. We announced its imminent release, but now that we have had a chance to read it we can safely say this book is awesome. The book is comprised of stories from various members of the public and press explaining their stories of growing up as someone who is LGBTQ, combined with a picture from when they were between the ages of two and twelve.

Andy’s Story in the ‘Born This Way’ book

This book is one of the reasons to get out of bed in the morning. You can pick it up and read it cover-to-cover or you can pick out random stories from throughout and you will find stories of all ends of the acceptance spectrum – people who have grown up with strictly religious parents who deny and refute their child’s sexual orientation until they grow up to loathe and ignore, right up to people who have parents who have known and accepted that they were born this way since an early age. For those who don’t or didn’t have a particularly good time with their parents, this can be a massive source of inspiration – ‘don’t let the bastards get you down’ fashion, but for those who grew up with a doting mother and not much knowledge of some of the harsh realities that LGBTQ people have had to deal with over the past thirty or forty years, this is a much needed wake-up call.

For us, this isn’t to our taste – factual writing doesn’t spark the imagination. But then who needs an imagination when you have a picture of a little boy wearing a snow white outfit?

Leaping straight off the page, some of these stories will cause you to be sat mulling them over for days, unsure as to how dramatised or realistic it really is. Incredulously they are all real. The stories from the celebrities mentioned on the jacket are dropped in and around nonchalantly (the only one we readily noticed was Perez Hilton’s, and that was because of his unusual first name) and anonymously with only their first name showing. This is perhaps why people have been so brutally honest.

There is a whole generation of LGBTQ people who are growing up as we speak, and being born this way, or any other way for that matter, should not be an issue. Hopefully this will serve as a reminder that there is always light at the end of the tunnel and that there is a bigger community than the one that you were born in, who will manage to accept you regardless of what you want to dress like.

You can buy the ‘Born This Way: Real Stories of Growing Up Gay’ book on Amazon now.