Michael V. Smith

Michael V. Smith is a multihyphenate force of nature: a novelist, poet, improv comic, filmmaker, drag queen, performance artist, and occasional clown. In this, his first work of nonfiction, Michael traces his early years as an inadequate male-a fey kid growing up in a small town amid a blue-collar toon meer family; a sissy; an insecure teenager desperate to disappear; and an obsessive writer-performer, drawn to various compulsions as a means to cope and heal. In coming to term both with his past "failures" at masculinity and with an aging father he is only beginning to come to know, Michael offers a new way of thinking about breaking out of gender norms, and reconciling with a dangerous childhood. toon minder