Southern. Black. Gay. Fatherless. Air Force Veteran. Ordained Methodist Minister. Master of hiding in plain sight. Cedrick Bridgeforth knows what it means to hold, hide, and wrestle with all of these identities. For years Cedrick had taken great pains to shield his full truth from the world. Then one day, at the height of his career, his entire universe came crashing down.
Equal parts preacher, poet, confessor, and consummate storyteller, Alabama Grandson chronicles Cedrick's hard-fought journey to come to terms with the hidden and sometimes conflicting parts of himself. Bookended by poignant letters to his grandmother, Cedrick vulnerably depicts the suffering caused by denying his truth:
You were the most influential person in my life. Yet as much as I admired and appreciated you, I did not trust you enough to say to you: "I am gay."
Written over three decades after his grandmother's death and at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Alabama Grandson asks as many questions as it answers.
This memoir will bring you along for a compelling and multidirectional journey into the past in order to point the way forward. All the while, Cedrick elegantly models that there are different paths to living a fully authentic life and different ways of being a leader and agent of change in today's world.
