Dangerous When Wet: A Gay Man's Struggle with Booze, Sex, and His Mother

TowleREAD is a regular audio feature in which LGBT authors read from their works. For this week’s TowleREAD audio selection, we return to the memoir, and bring you a special excerpt from Jamie Brickhouse’s critically-acclaimed book Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir of Booze, Sex, and my Mother, which Josh Kilmer-Purcell of The Fabulous Beekman Boys calls “a dark journey studded with gems of hilarity.”

Brickhouse spoke with us about his reading:

Dangerous When Wet is the darkly comic memoir of my long struggle with alcohol, my complicated relationship with my mother, Mama Jean, and my sexuality. From the age of five in small-town, Texas all I wanted was to be at a party with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other and all Mama Jean wanted was to keep me at that age, her Jamie doll forever. A Texan Elizabeth Taylor with the split personality of Auntie Mame and Mama Rose, she was always camera-ready and flamboyantly outspoken. Mama Jean haunted me my whole life, even after I moved to New York City and no matter how deep in booze I swam.

In this excerpt, I reveal the halcyon days of my early childhood in Texas, when I was Mama Jean’s constant companion and she was like a movie star to me. I appreciate her beauty rituals, long afternoons with her at the beauty parlor, and visits with her girlfriends, as only a nascent homosexual son can. The alcoholic fate of one of her girlfriends is an early foreshadowing to the dark days lurking in my future.

Listen:

You can pick up a copy of Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir of Booze, Sex, and my Mother, on Amazon.

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