Zigzag: And Other Stories

Description

Philip Gambone’s long-awaited second book of short stories takes off from where his highly acclaimed first collection ended, taking us now into the lives of older gay men, their adventures and challenges, heartaches, and joys. Set largely in Boston, these sixteen loosely interconnected new stories are about men who have experienced and witnessed a lot: marriages and break-ups; rekindling old loves and starting new romances with unlikely partners; the search for sex in an online era; the loss of familiar gay culture; the death of loved ones due to old age, sickness and AIDS; and always the adventure of living in a world where they have to make up the rules as they go along.

Gambone takes us to a radical faerie wedding, a closeted French teacher’s classroom, the weekly café gathering of a group of older gay bohemians, a randy eighty-year-old portrait painter who insists his clients pose in the nude, a gay man who discovers his brother is HIV positive, a man in a wheelchair who hires a straight, 23-year-old companion, another who periodically hooks up with a married man half his age, and a long-married gay couple whose weekly visits to a sports café in Boston’s Italian neighborhood presents a delicious and dangerous temptation.

Some of these men fight the temptation to live nostalgically in the past; others embrace the new opportunities that come with deeper insight and age. Whatever the case, in each story, Gambone explores how, as older gay men, each of his characters ultimately arrives at a place of greater equanimity, self-acceptance, wisdom, and even spiritual growth.

As George Stambolian said of his first collection, “Philip Gambone has done something extraordinary-he has written with honesty, humor, and compassion about the lives of ordinary gay men. His characters speak to us in voices that are almost hypnotically real. They charm us with their words only to catch us with startling revelations of truth.”

Now these “ordinary gay men” have reached a new, more complex stage in their lives, where the pull of multiple responsibilities, conflicting desires, and cross-generational connections both enriches and tests the identities they’ve built up over the years. Exhilarating, heart-warming, sexy, and very real-these stories zigzag through the twists and turns of each character’s life toward a place where gratitude, peace, clarity, and joy radiantly triumph.