America's Boy

“A revelatory story about acceptance, pride, and the many ways even a seemingly prejudiced family can surprise us” by the bestselling author of Magic Season (The Washington Post).

Indie Next List “Great Read” Selection
American Library Association’s Inaugural “Rainbow List” Selection

In this memoir, writer and journalist Wade Rouse delivers a humorous and heartwarming account of his Midwestern childhood and coming of age as a gay man.

Born in Granby, a small farm town in the southwest Missouri Ozarks, Wade was a fish out of water as long as he could remember—or at least since he participated in his family’s mock Miss America pageant when he was just five years old, clad in his grandmother’s red “whore” heels and his mother’s black-and-white polka-dot bikini.

Life didn’t get easier in Wade’s conservative hometown, especially after his older brother died just a month after Wade graduated junior high school. It was then that Wade buried his brother—and his sexuality, so his parents wouldn’t mourn the loss of a second son. Finally, after years of a descent into obsessive-compulsive behaviors and overeating, Wade was able to come out to himself, losing weight and gaining confidence until he had nothing left to hide.

Filled with memories of happiness and heartbreak, America’s Boy is both “a quirky tribute to [Rouse’s] rural Ozark family, and an easily digestible, homespun tale of a bygone era in Middle America” (Time Out Chicago).

“A storyteller and a memoirist in the best sense of the words. . . . Reading Rouse’s memoir is more like sitting with a good friend and a cold beer, trading stories and remembering those things that may have been painful or tragic at the time, but must now be respected for what they are.” —Metro Weekly