Troy Johnson's First Memoir About Growing Up With a Lesbian Mother

KPBS | By KPBS Public Broadcasting

Published June 18, 2008 at 9:50 AM PDT

This story was published more than 16 years ago.

For years now, San Diegan Troy Johnson has guided locals on music, restaurant trends, and the Padres. Now he's gone personal with a new memoir about growing up with a lesbian mother. Johnson's first

Tom Fudge: Troy Johnson has two nice parents. They got divorced. But that happens. The thing that was entirely unexpected to Troy was finding out that his mother was a lesbian. Unfortunately, he didn't get the news from his mom but from one of his mom's spurned girlfriends, a woman Troy affectionately refers to as the "Tattle Dike."
The years it took for him to come to terms with his mother's sexuality are laid out in a book he's written called Family Outing . If you're expecting this book to be a model of serious reflection about the need to be accepting and tolerant, it's not. It's a rowdy and humorous description of his life and what was going though he head when he was a teenager.

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Troy Johnson is senior editor at Riviera Magazine and a frequent guest on Weekend Preview . His first book has just been published. It's called Family Outing: What Happened When I Found Out My Mother Was Gay .