# Boys and Oil

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/taylor-brorby/boys-and-oil/9781324096788

JSON version (same data): https://www.bookquiver.com/taylor-brorby/boys-and-oil/9781324096788.json

- Book: [Boys and Oil](https://www.bookquiver.com/taylor-brorby/boys-and-oil) ([Boys and Oil.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/taylor-brorby/boys-and-oil.md))
- Authors: [Taylor Brorby](https://www.bookquiver.com/taylor-brorby)
- Publisher: Liveright
- ISBN: 978-13-2409-678-8
- Published: 2025-06-03
- Language: en_US
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

" I am a child of the American West, a landscape so rich and wide that my culture trembles with terror before its power." So begins Taylor Brorby's Boys and Oil, a haunting, bracingly honest memoir about growing up gay amidst the harshness of rural North Dakota, " a place where there is no safety in a ravaged landscape of mining and fracking." In visceral prose, Brorby recounts his upbringing in the coalfields; his adolescent infatuation with books; and how he felt intrinsically different from other boys. Now an environmentalist, Brorby uses the destruction of large swathes of the West as a metaphor for the terror he experienced as a youth. From an assault outside a bar in an oil boom town to a furtive romance, and from his awakening as an activist to his arrest at the Dakota Access Pipeline, Boys and Oil provides a startling portrait of an America that persists despite well-intentioned legal protections.