Rogerleslie phd

Dr. Roger Leslie is a scholar in the fields of success and education. Through major literary houses, medium and small presses, and his own publishing house, Leslie has published fiction and nonfiction books in multiple genres: historical fiction, inspirational self-help, spirituality, writing and publishing, movie reference, teaching and librarianship, biography, history, and memoir.

Leslie has won numerous national awards including ForeWord Book of the Year, The Ben Franklin Award, and Writer’s Digest’s #1 Inspirational Book of the Year. At its inaugural event, Leslie received the Houston Literary Award for his body of work.

His vast experience as an author, publisher, writing coach, and talk show host have put Leslie is in high demand as an international speaker. In every book and presentation, Leslie entertains, inspires, and empowers people to live the life they dream and soar toward their own ideal of success.

Uncaged welcomes Dr. Roger Leslie

Welcome to Uncaged! Your book will release on June 5, Light Come Out of the Closet and is a memoir. What inspired you to write this? What do you hope readers will take away from reading it?

My goal in life is to inspire people to live the life they dream and empower them to follow their own unique spiritual path. Light Come Out of the Story tells the foundational stages of breaking free of traditional thinking that did not fit my life and embarking on the spiritual adventure that has shaped my life since. I want my book to invite readers to explore their own soul and find the courage to live unapologetically and love unabashedly.

Is this your first published book?

Oh, no. I’ve been an author all my life and have awardwinning books in numerous genres including spiritual- ity, self-help, writing & publishing, education, librarianship, biography, historical fiction, and even movie reference.

What is the most difficult part for you to write? What was the easiest?

I have a lifelong commitment to saying and writing only positive, encouraging words. But, of course, drama arises from conflict, and my most profound childhood learning resulted from being challenged and even berated by some adults. The most difficult but exciting quest in writing Light Come Out of the Closet was to present those persons honestly but fairly. I believe I achieved my objective by exploring my multidimensional, layered relationships with those adults.

The easiest scenes were the funny ones. I have some very quick-witted relatives whose bon mots are legendary.

What are you working on now that you can tell us about?

I’m always in the process of writing a work of fiction and nonfiction. Currently I’m revising a Christmas novel and tracing a spiritual journey into my own soul.

What are some things you like to do to relax when you aren’t writing or working?

Like most authors, I’m a voracious reader. I also love spiritual practices such as meditation and yoga. I find assembling jigsaw puzzles very therapeutic. I usually do six or seven 1,000-piece puzzles in a single day.

Do you prefer ebooks, audiobooks or physical books? Are you reading anything now?

I love them all, but I still read physical books most often. I recently finished Louise Penny’s mystery, Still Life and am currently reading Paul Selig’s I am the Word and Paul Gallico’s Mrs. ‘arris Goes to Paris. (I bought that novel because the movie enchanted me.)

What would you like to say to fans, and where can they follow you?

What behind-the-scenes tidbit in your life would probably surprise readers the most?

While I love creating emotional risks and intellectual challenges for myself as an author, I’ve never been much of a physical daredevil. Yet I’ve faced death more than a few times. Among the most memorable were being in my house when a tornado ripped off my roof and surviving a train derailment in England.

Before you ever felt the inspiration to pursue anything, Life already set in place everything you need to succeed. Simply uncage your mind, trust your intuition, and follow your heart. You are meant to live the life you dream. Fans can find me at https://rogerleslie.com/. Beyond subscribing to my inspirational emails, they can follow me on social media or watch my live weekly show, I’m Spiritual…But, on YouTube

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Enjoy an excerpt from Light come Out of the closet

Light Come Out of the Closet

Roger Leslie, PhD

Memoir

Available June 6

When a joyful boy realizes he is gay, he fights against family and religious prejudices to reclaim the God of love he learned about in hopes of discovering what it means to be a gay soul.

Excerpt

Before I was old enough to articulate them as defining truths, I have known three absolutes:

I love God.

I love my family. I am gay.

The sliver of the world I knew in childhood consistently supported those first two insights. I was raised by parents so committed to our religious upbringing that Dad worked extra to send my sister, brothers, and me to Catholic school. In my closeknit, Polish-American enclave, the family unit was paramount. Loving God and loving my family came with a guarantee: who I loved loved me in return. Though it remained unspoken, I always belonged. Then I awakened to a frightening suspicion. My third truth—that I am gay—could negate my assumption that love was automatically reciprocal. As the truth of my sexual identity clarified for me, so did the possibility that my family might not love me gay. But an intense terror loomed more threateningly in my waking life as a child and my hours of prayer as a young soul: What if being gay meant that God wouldn’t love me either? All the affections and desires for love that felt natural to me, as a child of God made by God’s hand in the image and likeness of God, seemed at odds with what the world and my religion suggested was honorable and spiritual.

I have always known I am gay. Even before I understood what that meant, I sensed that I was different from everyone else I grew up around, even my own family. Yet in my stable home with my loyal parents, I felt safe, protected, and, yes, loved. But whether a sign of the era or my culture, love as I recognized it in my childhood home was neither verbalized nor demonstrated with physical affection.

When I was very, very young, I know that my dad held my hand when we walked on vacation because once we lost each other’s grip on a packed boardwalk. When I reclaimed the hand, it felt rough, and it pushed mine away. I was shocked to look up and discover I had grasped a stranger’s hand. On another vacation we walked so long down sidewalks of Toronto that I dragged beside my father, leaning on his arm as we trudged to our hotel. At the time, I didn’t recognize his support as love.

In my family, Dad always encouraged us to forge our own path. “Be a leader, not a follower,” he admonished all his children. As a result, my siblings and I were vehemently different. It seemed a requirement in our family to develop our character by finding interests that no one else in the family enjoyed.

Judy, the eldest of us four children, became an accomplished ballerina from early childhood through her teens. It took little time for her to outperform all her peers and become the star pupil of once-famous ballerina Leona Lucas.

My older brother Randy loved—and excelled in—every sport available to a suburban boy in the

1960s. In the basement he hung caricatures of his favorite baseball players. On his desk he displayed an entire collection of walnut-sized pro football team helmets. Most proudly, he cherished a ceramic mug embossed with the front page of the September 18, 1968 Detroit Free Press with the headline “WE WIN!” in reference to the Tigers’ World Series victory. Before long, that mug was buried among trophies my brother won—for baseball and football and basketball. Most impressive about my brother was the fact that he overcame an early childhood mobility issue to excel in athletics.

I wanted no part of dance or sports. Instead, I loved visual and literary arts. I didn’t just watch movies and television and read books. I studied them, then researched the background and process of developing anything creative. I wrote stories or designed scrapbooks of my favorite celebrities. I loved developing all types of puzzles. I created my own word searches and crosswords. Once I decided I wanted a jigsaw puzzle featuring my favorite movie, The Poseidon Adventure. When no company manufactured one, I assembled a thousand-piece puzzle I had at home, turned it over, and drew my own.

Whatever I loved, I immersed myself in so passionately I didn’t care how often others made fun of me. But it did lead me to perceive myself as different from other children.

I could be sociable. I enjoyed playing outside with most of the other children who grew up around me on our cul-de-sac. We raced our bikes or bounced our Super Balls so high in the air we would momentarily lose sight of them. I played with girls more than boys. Despite our dissimilar interests, Judy, Randy, and I often had similar toys. When Ray came along, he never seemed interested. While very young, Judy had a Barbie, Randy had a Ken, and I had an Allen. Not thinking anything of it, one day I saw neighbors Cathy and Jackie Farchione on their front porch playing Barbies, so I brought over Allen and joined them. They were happy to include me, but other children on our court made fun of me. I didn’t quite get why.

So rather than join others in their interests, I took Dad’s “be a leader” advice to heart and led activities. Once I decided to teach the younger children on the court how to roller skate. When I designed fliers about my upcoming free lessons (“Fun! Fun! Fun!” promised my tagline), Randy chastised me for planning activities where I was better than others. That wasn’t my intention. When I learned something new, I liked teaching others so they could join me.

For a period, I wrote and directed some of the neighbor kids in skits based on TV shows like Bewitched and The Addams Family and Here’s Lucy. In time I even created my own show. The season Henry Fonda starred in The Smith Family, I developed my own, totally original live-action series, The Jones Family. For my pilot episode, I went all out, even redesigning our entire garage to replicate a family house. In one corner where we stored the lawnmower, I turned two sleds covered in beach towels into twin beds where the children of the family would reflect on the events of the show and end it with an uplifting moral.

In time I got more ambitious and wrote stage versions of movies. My cousin and I did a few scenes from Mary Poppins, but we never gave a full performance of my play. Eventually my lofty goals outgrew my directing talent. After only a few rough and contentious days of rehearsing my production of The Poseidon Adventure, my neighbor and main costar, Jeannette Mamo (I was planning to star in Gene Hackman’s role—hmm, maybe Randy had a point) marched into the garage where I was building the scaffolding for Belle Rosen’s heroic dive and barked, “I have just five words to say to you.” Raising one finger at a time, she counted out each emphatic word. “I. Quit. This. Stupid. Play.”

Considering the activities I enjoyed, I wonder how anyone could have missed the fact that I was gay. But in the early 1970s, I don’t know that many people even thought about anybody being gay. On his occasional TV specials, Liberace paused between interludes to describe how his mother would remain the woman in his life until he found the right girl, for which he was searching. I read nothing more into that. When Mom and I talked about what we’d read in fan magazines, she usually included a lesson about becoming an honorable man. She told me how starlets’ husbands who didn’t want to attend premieres entrusted Cesar Romero to escort their wives because he was such a trustworthy gentleman around all women. I never considered the more obvious reason that he was no threat to their marriage.

The little exposure I had to gay characters came from the movie reference books I had begun to collect. Richard Burton and Rex Harrison had starred as gay lovers in a film called Staircase, which I could never find in the TV Guide movie listing. I also read about The Boys in the Band and Sunday Bloody Sunday, but they were only telecast on the late, late movie.

The first gays I ever saw on television were not fictitious characters, but authentic people. One evening I stayed up very late with my mother watching television. After Johnny Carson’s program ended, The Tomorrow Show came on. That night, Tom Snyder featured a lesbian wedding. Personally, I didn’t feel one way or another about what I was watching. I was too overcome with the vehemence of my mother’s disgust as she grumbled, and watched, but never changed the channel. “They’re going to Hell” she told me with the same acidity that she spat the identical statement when Helen Reddy accepted her Grammy for “I am Woman” by thanking “God because She makes everything possible.”

The seething intensity of my mother’s reaction left me feeling both frightened and dead. I was already confused about sexual identity and God (“She?” I had no idea!). But in those moments it was as clear as the white carpet in the church those lesbians walked down how my family felt about what I was struggling to understand about myself. If I was gay, I was going to Hell.