Sign-In
Cart
Castro Street Blues
Paperback
General GLBTQIA FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher Price: $9.95
ISBN13: 9781890834654
Publisher: Palm Drive Publishing
Published: May 22 2023
Pages: 106
Weight: 0.32
Height: 0.25 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Desperate Husbands
A Gay Hero's Journey through Covid
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 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.
Also from
Fritscher, Jack
Television Today: A Primer of Critical Thinking, Censorship, Social Justice, and Fake News in American Popular Culture
Fritscher, Jack
Paperback
Corporal in Charge of Taking Care of Captain O'Malley: Stories for Bears, Daddies, and Leathermen
Fritscher, Jack
Paperback
California Dreamin': West Coast Directors and the Golden Age of Forbidden Gay Movies
Ross, Toby
Siedelmann, Marco
Fritscher, Jack
Paperback
Always Virginia: A Girl's Life in Kampsville and Jacksonville, Illinois, and Routt High School in the 1920s and 1930s
Fritscher, Virginia
Paperback
Also in
General GLBTQIA Fiction
That's What Friends Are for: A Hilarious, Tender Story Based on the Golden Girls
Rouse, Wade
Hardcover
Heap Earth Upon It: Exclusive American Edition with Additional Material
Howarth, Chloe Michelle
Paperback
The Impossible Garden of Clara Thorne: A Cozy, Sapphic Romantasy with Gardens, a Quest, and Lots of Spice!
England, Summer N.
Paperback
Heaven Official's Blessing: Tian Guan CI Fu (Deluxe Hardcover Novel) Vol. 1
Mo Xiang Tong Xiu
Hardcover
The Husky and His White Cat Shizun: Erha He Ta de Bai Mao Shizun (Novel) Vol. 11 (Special Edition)
Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou
Paperback
Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo DAO Zu Shi (Deluxe Hardcover Novel) Vol. 5
Mo Xiang Tong Xiu
Hardcover
The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System: Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong (Deluxe Hardcover Novel) Box Set
Mo Xiang Tong Xiu
Hardcover