Sharing Painful Learning.

• Date: 01 June 2023
• Author: Stockwell, Norman

A Place for Us: A Memoir

By Brandon J. Wolf

Little A

222 pages

Publication date: July 1, 2023

Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive.

Part memoir, part self-processing, and part call to action, and written by a survivor of the tragic Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, A Place for Us tells the story of Brandon Wolf's journey as a young, queer, Black man in the United States.

Wolf begins his story as a child growing up in Portland, Oregon, and facing the early death of his mother due to cancer. "To her, I was perfect. With her, I was safe," he writes. "And in an instant that had gone."

School, he says, was never a safe place. "To be the queer, mixed kid meant living in perpetual fear of a flying fist or a hurled slur," he remembers. But then he and a fellow student discovered the Myspace page of a white supremacist group at their high school. The group had a "hit list" that "read like a who's who of the...