When Oliver Sacks was 18, he faced a prospect most young people dread: a belated talk about the birds and the bees with his dad.


"You don't seem to have many girlfriends," Sacks wrote his father said in his memoir, "On the Move,' released earlier this year. "Don't you like girls? ' Perhaps you prefer boys?'Sacks didn't try to hide."Yes I do '" but it's just a feeling -- I have never 'done' anything,' Sacks told his father.


He pleaded with his father not to tell his mother -- but his father did. The news did not go over well -- to say the least.


"You are an abomination,' she said. "I wish you had never been born."

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