To thine own self be true—no matter what it costs.

Acclaimed author J. G. Hayes returns to the gritty streets of South Boston for the much-anticipated sequel to his critically heralded debut, This Thing Called Courage. Now Batting for Boston: More Stories by J.G. Hayes goes home to the bars, housing projects and D Street bedrooms of Southie, where you can feel like a stranger in your own skin, just trying to survive growing up gay among working-class Irish-Catholics who don’t want to hear the hard truths about their sons.

Unlike my father, it wasn’t only Life I hoped to jump into during my long light-gazing vigils on the roof. In particular, it was a particular bar in a particular part of town, a bar whose blacked-out windows were lit up like Christmas every day of the year. It was a bar for people like me. For although I may have looked like my father, and loved baseball like my father, I was not heterosexual, like my father. And all the prayers to St. Anthony in the world hadn’t changed that.