Length8h 31m
About this audiobook
Richard McAllister grows up in a tight-knit Scottish community where certain things are simply not spoken of. He is bright, observant, quietly different, and old enough to understand that being different in a place like this is not a gift but a problem to be managed.
Narrated from a sunlit Toronto apartment at the age of sixty-five, this is the story of a man who spent four decades managing that problem, and of what it cost him, and what it eventually set free. Across Scotland, England, Pennsylvania, and Canada, through marriages and affairs and careers built and reinvented, Richard lived in two registers at once: the life the world saw, and the life that ran silently beneath it.
Unflinchingly honest and written with remarkable grace, Straight to Gay asks what we owe ourselves when the self we have been told to be is not the self we are. It is a book about the extraordinary cost of living inside a secret, and about the quiet, hard-won freedom that waits on the other side.
Audiobook details
GenreGeneral Fiction
Length8 hrs 31 mins
Narrated byRecorded Track
FormatAudiobook
Publish dateOct 21, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Author's Note
2Prologue — Toronto, 2026
3Chapter One — The Town That Held Its Breath
4Chapter Two — Something Without a Name
5Chapter Three — The Last Years Before Glasgow
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6Chapter Four — The City That Opened Everything
7Chapter Five — The Education Beyond the Classroom
8Chapter Six — The Long Degree
9Chapter Seven — The Year Between
10Chapter Eight — She Asked for a Divorce
11Chapter Nine — The Magazine, the Boy in the Phone Box, and the Terrible Bar
12Chapter Ten — The Girl, Her Brother, and the Sign He Needed
13Chapter Eleven — The Hotel, the Upgrade, and the Man Who Looked Like James Bond
14Chapter Twelve — The Cavalier Years
15Chapter Thirteen — Five Star Hotel, Ten Star Bigotry
16Chapter Fourteen — Jim, the Key, and the Letter
17Chapter Fifteen — Gay Overload at Christmas
18Chapter Sixteen — America, the Closet Again, and the Latino
19Chapter Seventeen — The Conference, the Hotel Room, and the Man Who Changed Everything
20Chapter Eighteen — Toronto, October 1999
21Chapter Nineteen — Arriving With Almost Nothing
22Chapter Twenty — The Gay Baptism
23Chapter Twenty-One — Circuit Parties, Pride, and the Education of Being Out
24Chapter Twenty-Two — A Beautiful Home and an Honest Life
25Chapter Twenty-Three — The White Party Wedding
26Chapter Twenty-Four — The iPad on the Bedside Table
27Chapter Twenty-Five — The Open Relationship
28Chapter Twenty-Six — The Second Divorce
29Chapter Twenty-Seven — The Slut Phase
30Chapter Twenty-Eight — The Tinder Gods
31Chapter Twenty-Nine — Danny
32Chapter Thirty — Letters to the Future
33Epilogue — The Notebook Is Full
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