Growing Up Grant

I grew up Grant because Ulysses was too dangerous a name to call a kid in the 1950s, when conformity ruled, and Ulysses S. Grant's reputation was in the toilet. My given name Ulysses, however, ended up defining me as I was coming out in the early 1970s, altering my relationship with the world. On my father's side, an Alsatian immigrant to Colonial New York and, on my mother's, a Puritan dissenter seeking freedom on the Mayflower, added romance to my bland Leave it to Beaver life in Syracuse, New