From Publishers Weekly
This zesty latest segment of a fictional autobiography opens in the frenetic 1960s when Picano ( Ambidextrous ) discovers Europe--and his homosexuality--and ends two decades later with the first rumblings of AIDS. The narrator is a brainy bon vivant, a Casanova from Queens who travels abroad after college to find love. His grand tour is uneventful until he lands in Italy, where he falls in with a gang of mischievous Americans and is fawned upon by a famous Yugoslavian film director named Djanko. The Italian section is the most accomplished here, spiked with adventure and romance. When Picano heads back to New York to recover from a broken heart, however, the story noticeably flattens, with an endless succession of sexual conquests, parties, jobs and encounters with the famous. His cameo of the poet W. H. Auden is amusing, but much of the novel seems to detail merely cynical social climbing. The ending walks the reader through the Stonewall rebellion, which marked the beginning of the gay rights movement, and into the moment when a mysterious new disease seems to be targeting gay men--a ham-handed finish for an otherwise distinguished and humorous portrait of a vanished age.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
This second installment of Picano's fictionalized autobiography (following Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children , Gay. Pr., 1985) covers a relatively brief period in the mid-1960s when the author was in his early 20s. It has two main focal points--a sojourn in Rome during which he fulfills his objective of becoming homosexual and his life as one of the Jane Street "girls" back in New York a couple of years prior to Stonewall. In part the tale of a young man's search for identity and an examination of life in a world on the verge of change, its often pretentious, self-indulgent, and gossipy tone also suggests a put-on (at least one hopes it's a put-on) of the tell-it-all tales now so popular. It is further marred by loose editing (i.e., implausible time frames, Michael York playing Tybalt and not Mercutio in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet ) and a weak ending. Still, it has some wonderful episodes--e.g., tea with "aunty" W.H. Auden--and thus should find an audience. For popular fiction collections.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
