The search for freedom

Fair Shaw and his partner Chris and their friend David, and a younger man, Julio, had been at the Tea Dance at the Boatslip late in the last day of Race Point Light. Then, instead of going to a restaurant, the four of them decide to get food at the grocery store and...

AIDS, freedom, P-town, friends, life

This excerpt is from late in Race Point Light. The narrator is Fair Shaw. He is just arriving at the Boatslip, a hotel on the water in Provincetown that hosts a tea dance every afternoon during the summer. It is June, 2004. Shaw is with his partner, Chris, and their...

Remember Charles Howard

On July 7, 1984, thirty years ago, in Bangor, Maine, Charles Howard was murdered by violent, homophobic boys. After his death, people who knew him found themselves rootless, without a clear way to move forward or a clear rationale for living, and without knowing who...

A time when gay men could create themselves

Bo Ravich, 30, a stage carpenter, is sitting on a roof outside the kitchen window of his apartment on Weehawken Street, off Christopher Street in Greenwich Village in New York, June 30, 1969. During the long, hot afternoon, Bo is talking to Belle, the producer of the...

Interesting times

Race Point Light doesn’t end when the narrator comes out. Like most LGBT persons, the narrator of Race Point Light still has at least half a lifetime to live after he moves into the gay community. He has things to do. He has to find a way to live. He has to support...

Building a new world

When the four principal characters of Adam in the Morning, who are, many of them, connected through a local repertory production of The Tempest, come off what is for them a world-transforming moment, they sit on the roof outside Bo’s bedroom window and watch the sun...

Narratives, change, violence

Bo Ravich opens Adam in the Morning lying on the steps of the theatre where he works, on Sixth Avenue, and in the next two or three hours he becomes a different person. Narratives—stories—seem to require that characters change in some way, either suddenly, like Bo, or...

A different kind of gay novel

Joseph Roche was active in voter registration drives in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, in 1964. He was from Los Angeles, and in 1961 he volunteered for Freedom Rides after he saw the first one on TV and saw young people beaten by racist mobs. His mother had taught...

Looking for Love in the Places that Are Available

My novel, Race Point Light, is about a guy who knows from childhood that he likes men. He never wavers about that, all of his life. He has a magical affair with another soldier in 1959 in the most beautiful meadow on earth, on the higher slopes of Mt Rainier. He goes...