Taylor Brorby: I’m not sure I want to be a pioneer! It’s difficult to look at bookshelves in 2022 and realize how scant attention the part of the world you love receives except for maybe outdoors writing about hunting, fishing, and football. Can you speak a little about any feelings of obligation, and perhaps resulting pressure, to be a pioneer of sorts in this genre?
Kathleen Yale: While researching, you found incredibly few gay narratives in the pantheon of literature of the American West, Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain (and the lauded Hollywood film of the same name) being the only one most people can name. Set against the prairies and coalfields of North Dakota, Taylor Brorby’s Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land is a lyrical coming-of-age memoir about the loneliness of a gay childhood in the rural West, the legacy of extractive industries, and the making of an environmental activist.
