Race Point Light describes a chaotic world for queer people in which politics, medicine, the universities, the military, even the churches, all the big players in the culture of late-twentieth century America-and, of course, the queer community-combine to be a part of Fair Shaw's life. RPL captures the chaotic quality of Shaw's life, and the difficulty of controlling events. This is a literate book, well-written, well-researched, full of detail about the period and the man. It is a very powerful story and has the same pattern as the lives of many gay men and lesbians who lived between 1945 and marriage equality. Most of them had to learn to fight back and lost their allegiance to the culture they were born into.