Bare Life
is the third volume in
The Eldorado Trilogy
, following
The Lede to Our Undoing
and
Ojo
. It checks in on the lives of the characters in the first two volumes, forty years after the action left off--though reading the first two volumes isn't a requirement for understanding events. If
The Lede
are about finding love in a homophobic and HIV-endangered world,
asks what it means to have survived and even thrived despite those challenges. But it also poses the question, Survived and thrived how? At what cost? And to whom? It wonders, Have we really arrived, or is it just something we tell ourselves? And if what we considered success in early life turned out not to be as satisfying as we hoped or predicted, what did we miss? What would we change? The novel thinks about shifts in the category queer, how it has opened up to a whole host of new ways of being, new identities, and challenges both inside and outside of a queer community in dealing with age, class, gender, race, religion, and other ways of being human.