Author: Brent Love
ISBN: 9798889260202
Tags: Gay, Memoir, Nonfiction
In a small Texas town, Brent comes out to his parents, and on that night his place in the world cracks wide open. Unmoored from his family but unwilling to give up on his dream, Brent enters the Peace Corps with the incredible task of navigating an unfamiliar land, a new language, and a new identity as a gay man in post-Soviet Armenia.
As he grapples with a religious past and a queer future, Brent finds himself immersed in a culture he’d never imagined. Brent moves in with Armenian families, celebrates his first Nor Tari, hunts mushrooms in the mountain mists, and dances in Yerevan at his first gay bar, all while hoping for and trying to find romance, even love. When his Peace Corps commitment takes an unexpected turn, Brent must decide what matters to him most and where he thinks he belongs.
“Leap, a coming-of-age and coming-out memoir, is one of the most generous and gorgeous stories readers could hope for. Filled with places and people that will stay with you long after you read it, Brent Love’s Leap invites readers to experience the growing pains of leaving home and coming into one’s own in a familiar body but a foreign country. The true nature of parental love, self-love, fraternal love, and romantic love are all deeply explored in this beautiful memoir about what it means to be an empathetic son, a “good” person, and at the same time, a newly-out, young, gay man seeking to experience adoration, affection, passion, companionship, and the deep love of a relationship.”
—Nicole Helget, Author of The Summer of Ordinary Ways
“This first-of-its-kind memoir vaults you into competing cultural perspectives of family, home, and living as a queer person in the twenty-first century. The result is an honest and thrilling reckoning of American and Armenian queer life.”
— J.P. Der Boghossian, Founder of the Queer Armenian Library and host of the podcasts This Queer Book Saved My Life and The Gaily Show
