Ulysses Dietz

Growing Up Grant (eBook, ePUB)

A Gay Life in the Shadow of Ulysses S. Grant

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

I grew up Grant because Ulysses was too dangerous a name to call a kid in the 1950s, when conformity ruled, and Ulysses S. Grant's reputation was in the toilet. My given name Ulysses, however, ended up defining me as I was coming out in the early 1970s, altering my relationship with the world. On my father's side, an Alsatian immigrant to Colonial New York and, on my mother's, a Puritan dissenter seeking freedom on the Mayflower, added romance to my bland Leave it to Beaver life in Syracuse, New York in the 1960s.

My world was a snapshot of prosperous, suburban Post-War America for a baker's dozen of years, until two of my siblings died and I realized, at sixteen, that I was gay.

The distillation of the lives of all those people who preceded me is the story of a baby boomer and a child of Stonewall; a Yalie who marched for gay pride in the 1970s, survived the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, adopted children in the 1990s, and finally married his Jewish partner of thirty-eight years in the twenty-first century.

The people who made me who I am today are always on my mind. They danced on the edge of the Gilded Age after the Civil War and helped define the American dream for three centuries. Among them were farmers, leather tanners, inventors, slaveowners, abolitionists, soldiers, industrialists, politicians, lawyers, a Nobel Prize winner, a president and even a princess. They're all there in me. My story is their story, yet entirely my own.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Ulysses Grant Dietz
• Seitenzahl: 356
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Oktober 2021
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780578999173
• Artikelnr.: 62733562

Autorenporträt

Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave it to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale (BA, 1977), and was trained to be a museum curator in the University of Delaware's Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (MA, 1980). A decorative arts curator at the Newark Museum for thirty-seven years before he retired, Ulysses has never stopped writing for the sheer pleasure of it. Aside from books on Victorian furniture, art pottery, studio ceramics, jewelry, and the White House, Ulysses created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice's landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel, appeared in 2012. His most recent novel, Cliffhanger, was released by JMS Books in December 2020. Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of 45 years. They have two grown children, adopted in 1996.Ulysses is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant. His late mother, Julia, was the President's last living great-grandchild; youngest daughter of Ulysses S. Grant III, and granddaughter of the president's eldest son, Frederick. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant's Tomb in New York City. He is also on the board of the U.S. Grant Presidential Library and Museum at Mississippi State University.