LGBTQ+ Memoir Reading & Social

Come join the authors in this reading, Q&A and conversation! Daniel Shenk's story serves as both a personal history of growing up in a missionary family in East Africa as well as a micro history of his and others’ grassroots AIDS activism at the height of that crisis in NYC.

The memoir is a narrative of a young man who is raised in relative isolation with his missionary parents and who eventually leaves his Mennonite community for New York City. As Daniel Shenk becomes the one his friends turn to in a crisis, he struggles to relate with a demanding father and uncomprehending siblings. He turns to existential thinkers and progressive theologies and ultimately to a welcoming church community to support him living out as a gay man. Daniel reimagines and transforms his missionary childhood to serve as an activist on the forefront of the AIDS crisis in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s. His is a story of family, complexity and transformation.


In blurbs for the book, author Mary Alice Hostetter writes that Daniel's story is one of "courage, resilience, and ultimately triumph as he accepts his own truth," and author Shirley Showalter writes: “[Daniel Shenk] is the Harvey Milk of the Mennonites.”