Fair Shaw grew up in South Carolina, where it is a struggle just learning what it is to be an American.  He gets his first heads-up when he is small and someone says to him, “We don’t do that here.” He already knows he is gay, but he wants to be an American too, and he doesn’t know if both are possible. He decides, reading Moby Dick at 17, that he will be a writer. He will write something big and moral, and he sets about learning how. College is just like high school, homophobic and racist, and he quits after two years and goes into the Army, which isn’t like his high school. There are black men, black officers, and the armed services had only been integrated ten years before.  A guy invites him to go hiking up Mt Rainier. The soldier wants sex. It is a confusing time. Later, he meets a woman in graduate school and eventually marries her—it is a way of protecting himself—and they have two children, whom he loves. He is strong and brave, and he thinks he can survive as a gay man in a marriage, but he comes from a long line of alcoholics. He becomes a college professor and drinks a lot and wows his students and lives with his wife and children among a crowd of guys living with their wives and children, and he stays drunk all the time, relieving the stress of living the way he does. He doesn’t know what to do. He has forgotten he ever wanted to write a big novel. It is the Sixties, he is thirty-five, and he wants to be out on the street, marching, carrying a sign announcing the coming Revolution when what he is is a middle-class professional, deep inside the establishment.

Finally, he realizes he has to do something. He quits drinking. Eventually when he is five years sober, he divorces his wife and he quits the university. Just before he leaves town, a friend is murdered by three homophobic boys, and he begins to know that the subject of the big novel he is still going to write will have to do with the consequences of this murder, finding out how deep his society’s bigotry runs.

He arrives in Boston in the middle of AIDS. Fair Shaw marched during the sixties, voted on the left for thirty years, and everything he writes now in his books is in opposition to what he had been told as a kid.  His novels—and his life—examine American culture and find it undemocratic, discriminatory, indifferent to the suffering of the people, and materialist. During the course of Race Point Light, Fair Shaw builds a life with his husband and their children and their partners and his grandchildren and, of course, with the vibrant gay community.  It is the story of a man who has learned to be free. Buy Race Point Light. [Below are links to audio files of Dwight Cathcart reading passages from Race Point Light.]