Older Men Rock

After reading as many gay romances about young, randy men who have no inhibitions about their sexuality and acting on their sexual impulses, I find it refreshing to get a review book with two mature men who share their attraction in a somewhat restrained way.  This doesn't mean they don't have sex.  It's just that they aren't hopping from hookup to hookup like bunnies.

K. C. Burns' Rainbow Blues is a particularly wonderful example of this.  Here's a bit of my review which went live today at The Romance Reviews:

Love between two mature men who are ready and willing to settle down isn't all fireworks and grand displays, but rather gentle like the purr of a cat. Or so implies K.C. Burn in this thoughtful romance that explores the attraction of two dissimilar, but intriguing men.

 At 43, construction foreman Luke Jordan has been divorced two years, having been a faithful, hard-working, but closeted husband since his wife got pregnant in high school and he felt obligated to marry her. While he's had a few gay flings during his married years, Luke is a pretty laid-back homebody who doesn't make friends easily and doesn't know how to find a companion now that he's free.

 For Christmas, his 24-year-old college senior son Zack gives Luke a membership to Rainbow Blues, a very loose organization of gay blue-collar workers, and urges his dad to go to their events. Luke agrees and goes to a play where he spies romantic lead Jimmy Alexander and is immediately attracted to him. When he shyly meets the 38-year-old amateur actor after the production and takes him out, he learns that Jimmy's day job is high school science teacher.

 Through a series of dates, the even-keeled Luke and high-strung Jimmy realize they love each other and are perfect for one another. Sure, they have bumps in the road--Zack originally fears Jimmy's a gold-digger looking for a sugar daddy and warns his father, for example. But the primary ingredient in this enjoyable romance is the wisdom of maturity.

Read the rest of my review at The Romance Reviews: http://glbt.theromancereviews.com/viewbooksreview.php?bookid=14362

Very Little Behind the Curtain

Usually I love Amy Lane books and can't get enough of them.  I was really excited about reading a book of hers about the theater, especially the behind the scenes people because I was once a costumer at the Alley Theatre in Houston.  Also I live in Sacramento near where the story is set, and I used to teach in a community college just like the one the protagonist attends.  As far as I was concerned, Lane's Behind the Curtain should have been the best book I've read this year.

So you can imagine my surprise and disappointment when it fell way short of my expectations.  Lane's made a career writing about lonely, lost gay boy/men who are struggling to find their way in this mad world of ours.  In almost all of her books, she gets to the heart of the men, and each story is an individual study of how one person's demons either help or hinder him in attaining happiness.  The Johnnies series of porn stars in Sacramento is a case in point.  Each man's story, while filled with angst and past unhappiness, is a story of overcoming adversity and discovering who he is in order to be fulfilled.  There's no mistaking David/Dex for Chase or Tommy or Kane.

But in Behind the Curtain even the mega-talented Jarod is nothing more than an anonymous ballet dancer who's seen the world but never lived in it.  Dawson and Benji, while joined at the hip as friends, never break apart and become living, breathing entities like the Johnnies sex machines do.  In fact, at times Dawson-Benji became so intermixed that I lost track of which one I was reading about.  When I have to remind myself Dawson = gay and Benji = straight just to differentiate the characters, I know the book is in trouble.

So what's going on, I asked myself.  I have to wonder if Ms. Lane has lost the passion for writing that she had a few years ago.  I hope not.  I believe in her and her talent.  But I think that readers and publishers and especially all her fans should just give her a little breathing room to write at her own pace and let her become rejuvenated by her passion for writing.  In this age of instant gratification, we should all give our favorite authors space to create and thereby produce their best work.