Fathers and sons: Writers throughout history have grappled with the relationships between them. Now The Man I Might Become: Gay Men Write About Their Fathers assembles twenty-eight essays, which, taken together, offer as complete a picture as we have ever had of how the lives of gay sons and their fathers unfold. "The anecdotes one hears in any gay lifetime," writes Andrew Holleran, in his foreword, "include every conceivable combination of father and sons—fathers who were despised, adored, crucial, irrelevant, remote or intimate—just like the fathers of straight men and women." From the first piece in the collection, Peter M. Krask’s "The Question I Asked Him," to the last, Bernard Cooper’s "Winner Take Nothing," the stories amply demonstrate this observation, and offer a moving pageant of lost opportunities and regrets, comforts and sorrows, hatred and affection. "These essays move sequentially from alienation toward reconciliation," writes editor Bruce Shenitz in his introduction, "with several intermediate steps—puzzled incomprehension, grudging acceptance, strained attempts at understanding—and a detour into sexual mythologies. Whether they are read in sequence or at random, they provide a rough typology of father-son relationships that are richly different from each other. There are no simple explanations for why some of these relationships deepen while others never move beyond painful confrontations; what these writings offer is the suggestion of a range of possibilities." The Man I Might Become offers an essential reading experience for every gay man coming to terms with his father, his family, and his own future as a man—and for any reader (straight or gay, parent or child) curious about the ways that we live with the legacy of our fathers.