Walking Higher

About the Book

Walking Higher: Gay Men Write About the Deaths of Their Mothers is a collection of 30 voices dedicated to exploring their relationships with the women who gave them life, and managing the aftermath of their mothers’ passing. Ten to twenty years ago, gay sons were pre-deceasing their mothers in alarming numbers as out-of-sequence deaths from AIDS ravaged an entire generation. Now that AIDS is a treatable disease, more gay men are surviving their parents. Hence, it seems timely to offer a series of reflections on the special and unique relationship of mothers and their gay sons from the perspective of the surviving sons.

The average heterosexual man has primary relationships with two women who are necessarily-- even under the best of circumstances-- competitors for his affections: the mother and the lover/wife. Even if Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex is a bit exaggerated, it must be at least partly true that straight men’s sexual desires for women create some strain or confusion in their relationships with their mothers. Again, we need not accept Freud’s pathological analysis of the gay man as a product of an overbearing mother to sense, or know, that the mother does indeed have a singular and powerful influence on her gay son. Her death marks a dramatic new chapter in her son’s life, one that often leads to adventures in new careers, changed relationships, and an irreversible alteration in self-perception. The joys and gifts our mothers brought to us, as well as the trials and sorrows, are never as clear, focused, or poignant as after she leaves us. The death of a mother changes a person on a fundamental level. There are no handbooks for walking through this particular grief, no condolences having the power to fill the new empty space inside you. It is a solitary and intensely personal journey.

Walking Higher is a tribute both to motherhood and to memory as it reaches across varying cultural boundaries in its honest exploration of the experience of loss and bereavement. Although focusing on the unique bond between mother and gay son, this collection is for everyone who has lost somebody he or she either chose to or was bound by duty to love and care for and who may even now be experiencing the loved one’s terminal illness.

Writers from all over the U.S. and Canada, and one from Ireland, are gathered in this anthology to pay homage to their late mothers. Not always easy to read, Walking Higher not only explores the pain of separation but also boldly confronts the universality of human loss and illness, existential angst, and questions regarding religious faith. Not necessarily a “politically correct” offering, this collection does not don rose-colored glasses in an attempt to sentimentalize death and dying. Many diverse issues are explored, including families dealing with alcoholism, emotional abandonment, mental illness, catastrophic illness, and some writers have experienced the death of their mothers at an incredibly young age and spent a good portion of the rest of their lives trying to understand the impact.

Walking Higher is not always a stroll through a rose garden because writers also explore the sturm und drang of both their internal struggles and clashes with family members. However, this collection also captures many of the special memories, the timeless adoration of the child for the mother, and never forgets to celebrate the power of maternal love and influence.

About the Author

Alexander Renault has published in multiple genres from pet magazines to feminist newspapers, on philosophical issues from freedom of speech to the intersections of religion and sex, on human subjects from survivors of the Holocaust to popular music’s rock goddesses. His journalism has been published in the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. Born on his mother's birthday, Renault is a tenacious Gemini with penchants for feminism and psychology. He has been working in the mental health field for 15 years. Renault lives with his partner in a little ranch house in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, with their two Boston terriers, Boris Karloff & Bela Lugosi. Note that the enclosed AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH should be credited, "Photo by Glenda Shope." The file is located on the accompanying image compact discs and the file name is ALEX IN THE SHADE.