Sometimes your own family isn’t enough.
Growing up different is never easy, but Michael, a deaf young man from a small town, knows that he must find his true family beyond his biological one. He struggles and fails to find others of his kind until he attends college in New York City.
There, we meet a variety of people from a deaf gay family of sorts: Eddie, an older accountant aching for love; Lee, an effeminate dishwasher with a pronounced weakness for red-haired men; Vince, a charismatic dancer who lives intensely no matter the state of his health; Neil, a brooding woodcarver who becomes a deaf woman’s obsession; Stan, a lanky stock boy at the A&P on Christopher Street; Ted, a hard-of-hearing college student with ambivalent feelings about the deaf community; and Rex, an ASL interpreter who avoids his own emotions during the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
It is through these people that Michael, no longer a smalltown boy, begins to create a new family of his own. Taking place from 1978 to 2003, his story will open your eyes and heart to what it means to be different in an indifferent world.
Over 20 years in the making, the novel was also a first-place grant recipient from the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation for Full-Length Fiction 2003. Since 1991, fourteen of its chapters have appeared in various journals and anthologies such as BLOOM and Men on Men 4: Best New Gay Fiction. One of its chapters, “Interpretations,” was chosen as one of the Best Gay Stories 2008 (Lethe Press). Two of its chapters were also adapted and performed as stage monologues.
The novel was formerly available from Rebel Satori Press via their Queer Mojo imprint. This new edition includes a foreword by the author.