Foreword

Desperate Husbands
A Quantum Journal of Covid Quarantine
The Coming-Out Novel
Meets the Elder-Exit Novel

This postmodern novel is a meta-fiction memoir of passionate emotions told by a marvelously unreliable third-person narrator. Masked as a Covid journal, this droll comedy covers three years of strict quarantine disrupting the household of a married couple of gay elders aging in place. As they try not to panic behind their own masks, they feel increasingly invisible, turning eighty in isolation, taking refuge in books, seeking meaning in waiting, as one does, for a gay Godot to rescue them, even as they continue recording themselves in the video journal they have shot for forty years as Proof of Life.

The longtime husbands are representative men, survivors of gay history, from their coming out into the homophobia of the 1950s to their rowdy post-Stonewall life of fifty years in San Francisco before retiring to the Marin Headlands across the Golden Gate Bridge. Quarantined there, they watch online news of thousands of Covid refugees and renters fleeing the City, creating the most empty downtown in America, turning their once fabulous Castro gayborhood into a ghost town.

Covid depression is the worst room in the best hotel of gay life. With the sinking feeling of drowning men, they see their pre-Covid queer life flashing before their eyes in slow-motion homosurreal memory scenes of magical realism, late-night noir films, and their own video diaries of friends lost to AIDS. Having survived isolation in the closet and the viral AIDS years, the veterans of the midcentury gay liberation wars, surveying their personal history, struggle forward on their gay heroic journey through the dark cave of Covid vowing never to surrender to the PTSD many gay men carry from years of homophobia.

The author keeps this tale of Covid lockdown, the New Normal, and desperate husbands real and authentic with time-capsule headlines ripped from the news of the pandemic, the rise of MAGA fascism, the great gay migration to Palm Springs, rainbow pronouns, and a transgender person leading the revived Pride Parade.

Director Oliver Stone said of his film Platoon, “This movie is not about me, but I had to be in Vietnam to write it.”

If this literary fiction, gayly packed with queer pop culture, seems as real as an autobiography, the author has done his job as an artist taking the reader on a fanciful ride as entertaining as his award-winning Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982.

Gay Fiction, Gay History

Desperate Husbands: A Gay Hero’s Journey through Covid

This fast-moving novel of gay San Francisco is a meta-fiction memoir told by a marvelously unreliable third-person narrator. Masked as a Covid journal, this pop-culture comedy, packed with dish, covers three years of strict quarantine disrupting the household of a married couple of gay elders aging in place.

The longtime husbands are survivors of gay history 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, late-night noir films, and their own video diaries of friends lost to AIDS.

The author keeps this tale of Covid lockdown, the New Normal, and gay marriage real and authentic with time-capsule headlines ripped from the pandemic news, the rise of MAGA fascism, and the great gay migration of Black Leather Swans to Palm Springs.

This literary fiction takes the reader on a ride as entertaining as the author’s award-winning Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982.