Road Home

One hot summer afternoon, Rex Ogle’s sexuality is found out and his father gives him an ultimatum: you can be gay, or you can live here, but not both—and you have twenty-four hours to decide. Rex desperately hopes for a reprieve that doesn’t come, and the following day, he leaves. With no place to go, he drives to New Orleans, where he has the phone number of a man he met briefly and kissed once.

This is a story of coming out, a first love that turns to betrayal, assault, and homelessness. Road Home vividly depicts a teenager falling through the net of family and society into a world of hunger, danger, and despair, and reaching a moment of desperate choice on a highway bridge above the Mississippi River. But this is also a story of survival. Intimate, honest, and compelling, it joins Rex Ogle’s award-winning memoirs Free Lunch and Punching Bag in mapping a young adulthood scarred by trauma and illuminated by strength and compassion.