This amuse-bouche gay pop-culture novel of arts, ideas, and history, packed with comic dish, is a meta-fiction memoir told by a marvelously unreliable third-person narrator. The “coming-out novel” meets the “elder-exit novel” in the circle of life when the closet of quarantine disrupts a happily married couple aging in place.
The longtime husbands are survivors from 1950s homophobia to their rowdy post-Stonewall life of fifty years in San Francisco. Their pre-Covid queer life flashes by in homosurreal memory scenes of magical realism, gay travel, late-night movies, online cruising, and their own video-selfie diaries of friends gone with the wind of AIDS.
The author keeps this tale of lockdown, school bullies, wicked priests, body image fascism, climate change, and gay marriage real and authentic with time-capsule headlines ripped from the news around MAGA insurrectionists, gay-bar shootings, and the migration of Black Leather Swans to Palm Springs.