A brave and deeply personal memoir of one man's quest to rise above the the political and religious rhetoric that had divided and diminished the human spirit for thousands of years. Aaron Anson engagingly writes about his own experiences of growing up a black gay Christian in a deeply religious South. Battling for years with depression and the inner turmoil of not being accepted as gay by a religion that espoused self-hate and a society that condoned hating others—he chose not to question his taught religious teaching and struggled instead with the inherent feeling of knowing he was gay while longing to be considered a Christian.
Confused and conflicted by the church’s ambiguous messages of conditional love, he married and fathered two children hopeful that his knowing of being gay would dissipate and relieve the tremendous burden he secretly harbored for many years. After suffering acute bouts of anger, bitterness and the frustration of three failed marriages he would eventually be forced to reckon the conditional love perpetuated by his religion and its departure from the authentic love he inherently felt for himself and others.
The profound endeavor to reconcile the two, sets Anson out on a life-enhancing and thought-provoking journey to discover the encompassing and authentic love we all once knew as our original source. In Mind Your Own Life, Aaron Anson assertively portrays an uncorrupted universal love and acceptance as our inherent birthright and explores the connection with our spirituality, sexuality, and morality. Anson tell his story with sublime prose and grace with inquisitive insight of our human sexuality. His story is beautifully rendered in a way that really hits home and told in a way that you will not soon forget.
Every once in a while I get a book that is a slap across the face because it allows to see the reality of something I may not have otherwise thought about. However, I have often thought about the fact that we get little information on what it is like to be Black and gay in a country that seems to have trouble accepting either minority and certainly not the two together. I am sure some of you might disagree with me by saying we live in a modern world and I say to you to take a closer look.
We know that writers use their own experiences when they write even if they just write a commentary on something. Aaron Anson most definitely writes from his own experiences of having grown up Black, gay and Christian. He never questioned his sexuality but he had a hard time reconciling it with his religion and so he got married and became a father and denied his homosexuality hoping that by doing so he could unload that burden from himself. Still he felt that he had to discover who he really was and began to look within to find his real self. This is what he writes about here.
There is no denying that each of us have our own story and some of us are willing to share yet we do not all have the gifts to do so. Anson tells his story with sublime prose and grace and he tells us a story that we will not soon forget. It is the same story for many of us but this story is beautifully rendered in a way that really hits home.
More than anything else Aaron Anson inspired me and let me know that there is something we can all look for and find. I am sure many of my white friends (and myself) have wondered what it would be like to be Black while others may wonder the same about being gay. I myself wonder what it would be like to be Christian (having been born and raised as an observant Orthodox Jew). Aaron Anson is the real thing and he gives us a very real message about love. He tells us that in order to know love we must know ourselves and be at peace with the world we live in. One of the sentences on the back cover says it all, “It’s better to be unloved for who you are than loved for who you’re not”. We must pull down the masks and in doing so we open the door for love to come in.
One of the major problems in GLBT life is religion. Many want us to believe that we are nor wanted and that there is no place for us. Yet we know that the same God that made so and so straight, made me gay. We do not have to wait for religion to accept us; we have the right to demand that acceptance (and I do not mean tolerance, I mean ACCEPTANCE). We learn here that before we can demand anything, we must be at peace with ourselves and know who we are. Read Aaron Anson and learn how to rise above what ails you and then do so with pride.
