Ah gay lagoon

To move between items, use your keyboard's up or down arrows. Disabling it will result in some disabled or missing features. You can still see all customer reviews for the product. Customer Review. Verified Purchase. This is the literary gay fiction version of a Loaded Pizza.

It has all the style. And the point is? I can only guess: To paint a vivid and unsparing portrait of life as an old, lonely, and unattached gay man I suppose. And that it does with great expertise. Unfortunately it is not the sad, strangely aimless protagonist that I found myself liking or relating to as much as the book's other prominent character, a marvelously drawn character named Earl whose health is progressively deteriorating.

Unfortunately, in the process of presenting a protagonist that seems very familiar from Holleran's other books it also delivers yet another work of entertainment that exemplifies a very old and dated stereotype of gay men: that unless we are partnered we are all lonely, sad men hankering after young grocery store baggers, leering at handsome strangers on the street, watching porn is anything more fake and unerotic than most ah gay lagoon porn??

Video arcades? Boat ramps? Someone still does this in the age of hook-up apps? The book is described as a "novel" but it reads more like a memoir or autobiography. Nothing wrong with that, but because I have read every one of this writer's other books I can tell you that he is describing the same general character as wandered the streets of Washington, D.

In fact, the same protagonist or lead character emerges in almost all of Holleran's books, a character who seems to find something exquisite in the most melancholic aspects of gay male life. Even Malone in "Dancer From the Dance" seemed 90 despite his youth and beauty, and was awash in despair and a tragic outlook of gay male life.

Notice I ah gay lagoon the ridiculous term "life style" as there is no such thing as a "gay lifestyle". The book is, as previously mentioned, at its finest when depicting an old guy named Earl whom the protagonist meets at a local sexual cruising spot a boat ramp again?

Are we just dying for a dance with Laura Law? Despite the fact that he is circling the drain from the start it is this single character who provides the book with its best and brightest elements. Also, unlike the protagonist, Earl is clear-eyed, rational, and accepting of the un-fabulous but inescapable final act of life.

The protagonist seems discomfited by this and at one point says, "In other words he was a calm and rational man - not a vain hysteric like myself".

The Blue Lagoon: A Romance

Ah-men to that I recently saw Andrew Holleran being interviewed in a You Tube video. He seemed like a rather sweet-natured and humble gay man The protagonist in this book similarly seems also a mixture of superficial affability and normality coinciding with an undercurrent of rage against the unfairness of ageing, life as a gay man, and death.

The way the character depicts his parents and his obligation to them in their last years of life suggests some interesting and perhaps less than fabulous family dynamics but the same could be said for most of us. To be fair, the protagonist does sound a bit vain, but not "hysteric".

He sounds depressed by mortality, depressed by the loss of his parents and old friends, and depressed by the loss of his sexual appeal. In other words, honest and accurate though it may be, this is a book about a man who embodies the gay stereotype of the lonely, chronically "thirsty", and therefore tragic gay man, a stereotype that has been milked in movies and books for decades.

I am tired of movies that depict gay men as tragic, movies in ah gay lagoon we must always die at the end of either suicide, murder, or something else. I recently saw a much lauded movie called "The Whale".