<p>I grew up Grant because Ulysses was too dangerous a name to call a kid in the 1950s, when conformity ruled, and Ulysses S. Grant's reputation was in the toilet. My given name Ulysses, however, ended up defining me as I was coming out in the early 1970s, altering my relationship with the world. On my father's side, an Alsatian immigrant to Colonial New York and, on my mother's, a Puritan dissenter seeking freedom on the Mayflower, added romance to my bland Leave it to Beaver life in Syracuse, New York in the 1960s.\nMy world was a snapshot of prosperous, suburban Post-War America for a baker's dozen of years, until two of my siblings died and I realized, at sixteen, that I was gay.\nThe distillation of the lives of all those people who preceded me is the story of a baby boomer and a child of Stonewall; a Yalie who marched for gay pride in the 1970s, survived the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, adopted children in the 1990s, and finally married his Jewish partner of thirty-eight years in the twenty-first century.\nThe people who made me who I am today are always on my mind. They danced on the edge of the Gilded Age after the Civil War and helped define the American dream for three centuries. Among them were farmers, leather tanners, inventors, slaveowners, abolitionists, soldiers, industrialists, politicians, lawyers, a Nobel Prize winner, a president and even a princess. They're all there in me. My story is their story, yet entirely my own.</p>

Growing Up Grant: A Gay Life in the Shadow of Ulysses S. Grant

Biographies & Memoirs

Dietz, Ulysses Grant

Regional U.S.

Ulysses Grant Dietz

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Ulysses Grant Dietz publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ulysses Grant Dietz

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Ulysses Grant Dietz publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Growing Up Grant: A Gay Life in the Shadow of Ulysses S. Grant