I Throw Like a Girl

In I Throw Like a Girl, writer and activist Chuck Forester chronicles his life-changing journey from a lonely and suppressed gay boy in 1950s Wisconsin to his eye-popping 1971 arrival in San Fracisco's Castro, where he finds community and empowerment to live his life as a proud, out gay man for the first time. Along the way, we're taken to gay bars and bathhouses of the period that once dominated the nighttime scene as places where gay men could explore and discover pleasures as never before. He is candid in describing his forty years as a sexually active gay man when San Francisco had a reputation for the best gay sex in the country.

The memoir also gives readers a searing firsthand account of the murder of San Fransisco supervisor Harvey Milk, the deadly emergence of HIV/AIDS that later killed his partner, as well as the author's role in elevating the LGBT community to being a power player in both local and national politics. At once exhilarating, uninhibited, and candid, I Throw Like a Girl is a rare, up-close remembrance of a vital time and place in queer life.