[6] He provided an epilogue for the 1990 reprint of the 1987 edition in which he explained that he used a pseudonym decades earlier to protect his writing career at CBS and to shield his parents.
[4] The novel is a Bildungsroman recounting the passage of Kurt Gray—his surname plays on the author's Brown—from his adolescent years in central Michigan to mature adult and his development as a musician and composer.
[7] Kurt's teenage years are marked by "solitude, bookish seriousness, gender dislocation, and religion", a dislike of sports, and an interest in amateur theatricals.
After graduating he explores the psychological literature of Jung, Freud, and Ellis, then Edward Carpenter, Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium, and Oscar Wilde.
Brown later said that it was in the main autobiographical, that he based Kurt on himself, Derry on Harry Burnett, David on his long-time partner Richard "Roddy" Brandon, and fourth major character, Tony, on actor Alexander Kirkland.
[1] Kurt's early discovery of masturbation is described in euphemisms, and he reads Bible passages—the stories of Onan, David, Sodom, Lot—"that suggested hidden knowledge".
[8] The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature (2005) called it "rather artless", but still a cut above the usual sensationalist and exploitative treatment of homosexuality in other works of the same period.