I avoided explaining that I had been motivated by the same desire and romantic greed that had propelled her to move from Barbados to New York.
As a young man, Als recalls in “ Notes on My Mother,” they helped him lay claim to a sense of romance that he had previously associated only with his mother, who left her home in Barbados in part to pursue a love affair: “I avoided explaining the impetus that propelled me to leave her home in Brooklyn for the piers on the West Side Highway. Looking at his intertwined subjects, I recall writer Hilton Als’ remarks regarding his own encounter with the piers. Baltrop’s piers seem to offer something beyond a permissive space for gay sex.