First Acts: A Black Playwright Comes Of Age

Playwright and television writer Kermit Frazier grew up in southeast Washington, DC, during the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. As a student at an all-Black elementary school, he was selected for a newly formed honors track at a predominantly white secondary school.

Traveling a complex path, Kermit tore down segregation barriers, balanced on an academic pedestal, and battled an internal war of denial against his same-sex attractions. . . .

Through a series of discrete yet interconnected chapters that each unfold through a different "aspect of perception," this memoir vividly describes a young Black man struggling with stereotypes, identity, and mild dyslexia while straddling two middle-class worlds, Black and white, and striving mightily not to be everyone's "other."