30
th
Anniversary Edition
"Sadownick's ambitious first novel combines AIDS activism, Jewish folklore, New Age therapies, kinky sex, and some extraordinary passages about life in contemporary Venice, California, and the Bronx of yesteryear. At the center is Michael Kaplan, an AIDS journalist living in post-riot Los Angeles. Sadownick juxtaposes the ghosts of Michael's adolescence in the Bronx -his Polish grandmother Frieda, his jazz musician brother, and his Puerto Rican teenage lover -against his current struggles in L.A., particularly his deteriorating 10-year relationship with Robert, an AIDS activist and performance artist." -Publishers Weekly
"It is through the reexamination of the only novels of gay men in this rich period that we come to understand how they loved, how they lived, how they imagined, without approval, in the middle of the mass death experience." -Sarah Schulman,
Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York
, from her introduction to this new edition
"For readers who love the character Hector: he is the representation of the gay erotic soul-his person, his passion, his unremitting love of Mikey, his kinks and nastiness, his willingness to risk all. He is the "gay symbol of transformation," the archetypal pattern that, according to each gay man's particular way of constellating the erotic gay soul figure, I believe, organizes all gay lives-a story that remains, for the most part, unconscious because humankind has yet to recognize that there are other people inside their own bodies, their own "I," as unstable as that "I" may be." -Douglas Sadownick, from his new postscript