In Dwayne Ratleff’s novel, Dancing to the Lyrics, a kid growing up in East Baltimore in the 1960s knows he’s different from the other children before he quite knows what it means to be gay. He’s processing that, as well as a lot of cruelty and depraved conduct by adults in his life, balanced with nurturing support from an assortment of characters. It’s a memoir cloaked in fiction. One piece of advice that sticks is not to care what other people think of him.

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