Andrew Tobias - The Best Little Boy in the World Grows Up

AN INVALUABLE CHRONICLE OF AMERICAN GAY LIFE IN THE PAST QUARTER CENTURY

Tobias is never afraid to laugh at himself or to account for his shortcomings . Its this kind of honesty and self-deprecation that make both The Best Little Boy in the World and The Best Little Boy in the World Grows Up books to be relished and recommended for many years to come.

Houston Voice

With charm and self-effacing humor, Tobias draws readers into his most private moments, recounting his first experience with long-term commitment, the pain of losing friends to AIDS and, finally, the difficult task of confessing his homosexuality to his parents. Tobias has proved to be an able writer of brave and touching memoirs that both gay and straight readers will enjoy.

Boston Sunday Herald

This is not only a sequel about how much the best little boy in the world has grown up. It is a book about how America has grown up as well.

Senator Robert G. Torricelli

An entertaining successor to the trailblazing 1973 book that lets the gay community know that not only is there life after forty, there is fun, too. Tobiass candid yet restrained style is refreshing. The most enjoyable part of either book is the rollicking manner in which Tobias writes. Sheer fun.

Philadelphia Gay News

A frank, fierce, and funny account of coming out in corporate, high-finance America. [Tobias is] a truly engaging, illuminating, and entertaining writer; his story of what happened in his life between 1973 and 1998 is an excellent book for the young coming-outers, the seasoned homosexual, and any of their families and friends.

Feminist Bookstore News

This is not just autobiography. This is self-outing on a grand scale and a significant risk for a media star. Yet if The Best Little Boy in the World Grows Up marks a courageous gamble, it also represents a gesture toward wholeness.

San Francisco Chronicle

POIGNANT AND RIVETING

[Tobias] has a talent for telling stories with charm and candor, and he vividly recounts what it was like to be a gay man during the heady days of the gay rights movement. In passages both bittersweet and political, Tobias offers memories of love and loss. Highly recommended.

Library Journal

Tobias is an ever-engaging writer with an effortlessly conversational style. This memoir will likely please fans of The Best Little Boy in the World, but also should make a respectable contribution to the expanding list of gay memoirs.

Austin American-Statesman

He has a healthy sense of himself, and a willingness to confess his own foibles that is positively endearing. His books are fun to read, entertaining, and occasionally heart-rending, well worth your time and treasure.

Bay Area Reporter

[Tobiass] eloquence is matched by a good sense of humor. He has lots of affirming things to say about being gay, which is his books most lasting benefit.

Booklist

[Tobias] continues his story with his familiar, funny, chatty tone and honest but discreet approach.

The Miami Herald

Via accounts of his coming-out experiences with family, friends, and colleagues and various trials and tribulations of dating and relationships, Tobias sketches the shifting landscape of homophobia in America. Tobias is most at home when writing about the intricacies of relationships, wittily depicting the subtleties and nuances of friendship, romance, lust, and love for modern gay men.

Publishers Weekly

Also by Andrew Tobias

The Best Little Boy in the World

The Funny Money Game

Fire and Ice

The Only Investment Guide Youll Ever Need

Getting By on $100,000 a Year (and Other Sad Tales)

The Invisible Bankers

Money Angles

The Only OTHER Investment Guide Youll Ever Need

Kids Say: Dont Smoke

Auto Insurance Alert!

My Vast Fortune: The Money Adventures of a Quixotic Capitalist

Not long ago, I was invited to speak at my high schools second annual gay and lesbian awareness assemblysix hundred ninth through twelfth graders. When I was sitting where they were sitting, I told them, not an hour went by that I did not think of my one central mission in life: never having anyone find out the horrific truth.

And there I was, telling virtually the entire school.

A couple of months later, I was asked to be a trustee. Boy, has the world ever changed.

This book is the story of that change, at least from my small window on it; and a thank-you note to thosevery possibly including youwho through their goodwill and open minds have helped change it.

This book also explains how I kidnapped Scot, why I am not secretary of the treasury, and some ways we might be able to change the world still further. But hang on.

W hat do you mean, Proposed Epilogue? my editor at G. P. Putnam & Sons asked a quarter century ago when he had finished reading the final draft of The Best Little Boy in the World.

We had just gotten through a long discussionI wouldnt call it a fightwhere I was trying to persuade him to let me use The Red Crayon as my pen name, which he said was stupid. (How would it be alphabetized in Books in Printunder Crayon?) And now we were on to the fightI wouldnt call it a discussionover what to call the last section of the book. To me, this was even more important.

The pen name thing I just thought was clever, and might cause reviewers to focus on an anecdote in the book about how once, when I was about eleven and incredibly sheltered I mean incredibly sheltered, and even more incredibly afraid someone would discover My Secret I had been at a party where we were all given crayons and paper and instructed to write some really terrible word. The slips of paperall anonymouswould then be collected, and the hostess, also about eleven, would read some dumb fill-in-the-blanks story about a princess. (This was back in the days before most eleven-year-olds had beepers and subscriptions to Wired.) So, being the best little boy in the world, and crouching back there behind the couch with my crayon and scrap of paper, I did exactly what I was told. I wrote the absolute worst word I could think of. And then our hostess began reading.

So the toilet princess and the booger prince went down to the slimeball fountain andall was going well until our hostess, looking at the next word to be inserted, burst into tears and went running from the room.

Something told me she had come to my scrap of paper. I began to sweat. Okay! her mother yelled, storming back into the room. Which one of you has the red crayon?!

Agh! The red crayon! It was supposed to be anonymous.

Anyhow, it seemed to me that the manuscript I had just submitted to G. P. Putnams had in a sense all been written with that red crayon a book about things thatas strange as this may seem only twenty-five years laterwere all but unmentionable.

So I just thought The Red Crayon was a more than apt pen name. And if it was different if it didnt fit the established mold well, wasnt that sort of the whole point? Wasnt that my life? And if it was a little on the cute side, what else was new? My college roommate Hank, as I called him in the last bookwho went on to become mayor of Cincinnati, incidentallyalways used to kid me about that. Is it any good? Id ask him of whatever Id most recently written. (In college, wed coauthored a book called