"This is a story about Walter Fricke and Aaron Fricke, father and son, heterosexual and gay (respectively on all counts). . . .

"It has taken six years to complete this book. During that time, there were periods when it was worked on steadily and times when the material was abandoned as hopeless. The book changed as our father/son relationship changed, and each transformation of the book reflected the transformations in our relationship. It is neither the same book nor the same relationship that we started with six years ago. This was a book that had to be lived, not simply written.

"The final product is the story of an evolving father/son relationship, a story of two people with different ways of looking at the world, and of the hurdles we needed to overcome to respect each other."