JOHNSON PARK -- PUBLISHED MARCH 15, 2013

Above is the print cover for Johnson Park, which will go live on Amazon on March 15, 2013 for $16.

Below is the E-book cover. It will be available simultaneously on Kindle, Barnes & Noble, and E-book for about $4.00

"JOHNSON PARK", Pt. 1 of MEAN GAYS, COMING OUT IN 2013

ARE YOU READY FOR MEAN GAYS THIS YEAR?

In late January, 2013, owner of the Runaway Pen (my former student T.L. Shreffler), is hosting a party to celebrate the two-year launch of my books! I am honored and indebted by Shreffler's decision to publish these, which have taken shape over decades of writing.

via Shutterstock

I'm only allowed to talk about Johnson Park (available on Amazon March 2013) at this point, because that's the opus that's coming out first. The cover is coming together nicely, but I have to stay mum!

The three books coming out over 2013 go together in the "Mean Gays" series, following up on an article I wrote for American Thinker earlier this year. Mean Girls was such a pivotal moment for pop culture, because it forced girls and women to examine their interactions and use storytelling to imagine other possibilities.

How Buffalo looks, September 1-June 30

How Buffalo looks, July 1-August 31

Part I of the three-part Mean Gays Series is Johnson Park, a book that spans from 1982 to 1994 in the oft-maligned town of Buffalo, New York.

It just so happens that Buffalo, New York, is where I lived for the majority of my life (1971-1988, 1993, 1998-2008), including about 16 years as the semi-happy son of a lesbian mother and her partner.

Buffalo, New York, is a lesbian paradise and a gay man's Purgatory. Really, I'm serious. It's blue collar, endlessly butch, full of bowlers and snow-plowers and people who like to get drunk and throw bottles at each other in front of lost tourists looking for Niagara Falls. Lesbians love it.

For gay men, it's a tough haul. The staunch Catholicism of Buffalo makes the town's spiritual center reflexively uneasy about gay life, and the ethnic groups that predominate -- Italians, Irish, Germans, Poles, Puerto Ricans, and black Americans -- imbue their tribal mores with varying levels of machismo.

The street called Johnson Park is a real place. It is a short street, connecting the art district of Allentown on one end and the Puerto Rican barrio on the other. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, Johnson Park didn't feel safe. It was home to me, though, being queer and Puerto Rican. Johnson Park was a sleazy place where all the city's perverse habits seemed to converge at night. Therein lies our tale.

Meet the Characters (A Mind's Eye View)

I scoured Shutterstock for faces that looked like the characters of Johnson Park. If you look up "gay" on Shutterstock, don't be surprised that all the models are fatless and buff; and there is only one picture of a black gay man (I'm serious). Still, the faces below capture my beloved characters whose lives intersect on Johnson Park. 

kind-of Riley Murdock

Riley Murdock is the first character who joins the plot. The book begins with him. The model to the right is much too thin to look like Riley, but he has some features that conjure Riley's personality.

In Johnson Park Riley is the well-behaved oldest son of a churchgoing sister in the city's black neighborhood, the East Side. Early in the book he is described as a "forthright, devoted man" (29) who "carried on his life in honor of his parents' virtues" (33).  He has a deep love for his mother, which is the reason that his arguments with her can sometimes be so painful. His Christianity remains a guiding force in his life, and he isn't afraid to remind his mother that he knows the Bible better than she does. He is also a forceful and sometimes intimidating man. Though he shares the clean and orderly traits of the man in this picture, he is also extremely imposing, with a bulky build, chubby cheeks, and tall frame. The book says, "He was gifted by birth with a tall body, a barrel chest, wide shoulders, and large arms" (6).

Kind-of Agosto Cruz

Not long after introducing the story through Riley Murdock's adventures on the West Side, Johnson Park also brings in the life of waif-like, delicate, but persevering Agosto Cruz.

Though his facial features are so similar to Angel Morales (see below) that many characters confuse the two of them, Agosto is chronically underfed, often starving. Before arriving in Buffalo, he spent his childhood and adolescence in mobile home parks around upstate New York, where his father picked apples.

Like all the other characters in Johnson Park, Agosto possesses a luscious beauty, so long as he realizes that he is beautiful and doesn't let the scorn of others discourage him. He puts on a tough exterior because that is what he has had to do, especially after coming to Buffalo as a homeless teenager. An elderly couple that takes him in "dislike[d] Agosto's table manners" but "when they heard him speak, there was a humility in his ways, and a childlike softness" (61-2).

Kind-of Angel Morales

Naturally the next character to enter the plot would have to be Agosto's unsuspecting lookalike (no spoilers!), who first appears in a chapter set in Manhattan. This individual's name is Angel Morales.

Angel's roots in Buffalo were actually suburban, though he tries to hide the fact, because he reinvented himself (or tried to) as a Harlem muscle boy at some point. Too educated, perhaps, for his own good, he judges New Yorkers with the small-town parochialism of Buffalo and he judges Buffalo with the cosmopolitan snobbery of New York. Perhaps one of the harder people to like in the book, he's full of hypocrisy. For instance, he claims he "didn't like too much muscles on other men" (84) yet he fusses obsessively about his own appearance, "spending needless hours at the gymnasium" (85).

Like so many pretty boys, Angel uses his apparent preening as a way to hide the fact that he longs to be a part of something real. He has spent most of his life as an outsider; too rich to be ghetto, and too tacky to be part of elite society. His search for authenticity brings him to Johnson Park, and that is where he begins to play a crucial part of the narrative.

kind-of Joseph Mancuso

The next dramatis persona to appear is the slim and quiet Joseph Mancuso, son of a Sicilian business owner in one of the wealthier suburbs of Buffalo.

His signature trademarks are his luscious black bangs and his haunting brown eyes. Growing up under the rule of a hardworking Sicilian patriarch who created a thriving construction business and greenhouse from scratch, Joseph faced high expectations growing up, and unfortunately, couldn't live up to them. He was too delicate for the gruff work of his father, preferring to paint graphic novels on his easels and usher patrons at the Hollywood Pantheon Theater.

Though Joseph could not be the athletic, macho son his father wanted, he "loved colors. Bright, flowing, extravagant. As a toddler he felt closest to his father on holidays, when Anthony dressed up in bright suits and shiny leather shoes, and he adorned himself with gold rings and wrist chains" (166). The Italian love of elegance and finery is inextinguishable in him, even though he gets by on meager wages as a high-school dropout. Joseph's main problem is that his deviousness makes dangerous men fall madly in love with him. For him Johnson Park is a truly dangerous place.

kind-of Harry Litwin

Finally, there is Harry Litwin, the gruff and aggressive, hulking son of a German father and a Polish mother. Growing up in lower-middle-class Cheektowaga, Harry has never had it easy. His grandfather's business was destroyed by black rioters in the East Side riots of 1967, and his father was laid off in the seventies, never to find another job again. His mother has a drinking problem.

Harry has never had the luxury of obsessing about his sexual orientation, because his whole life has been nothing but work--hard work. Despite his beautiful blue eyes and lustrous blond hair, he has had to subsist as a glorified gardener. What's great about Harry is that he bears the burden without complaining, even if he feels bitter inside. He and his brothers have to pay the bills to take care of their dysfunctional parents. Harry worries especially about the dangerous habits of his younger sister Valerie, who sports strange nose rings and dyes her hair violet.

The problem with Harry Litwin is that he can't keep everybody happy, and sometimes he breaks. His temper gets him in trouble. When he falls in love, he obsesses and frightens the men in his sights. Johnson Park is a place of temptation and heartbreak for him.

These are the five men whose lives become interlocked in a web of grudges, anxieties, and rivalry. They have little in common, other than the fact that they fear one another. Somehow, on Johnson Park, they will have to find some peace. Buy the book on Amazon in March to find out how.