The Gay Book Club

Two gay novels, two very different escape routes. This week: Edward Cahill's Disorderly Men against Joe Westmoreland's Tramps Like Us.Disorderly Men drops us into early-'60s New York, where a raid on a Greenwich Village bar throws three men — a closeted banker, a professor, and a grocery clerk — into the same paddy wagon and the same impossible question: how much happiness am I allowed? A pre-Stonewall thriller soaked in shame and blackmail.Tramps Like Us takes the other door — Westmoreland's autofictional road trip out of an abusive Kansas City home andinto the hedonistic sprawl of '70s New Orleans and San Francisco, all sex, drugs, and chosen family, right up to the edge of the AIDS crisis.One book about hiding, one about running. We talk about which one wrecked us more.

We double up on gay thrillers where love bruises back. P.J.Vernon's Bath Haus drops Oliver—recovering addict, doting doctor boyfriend, very wrong bathhouse hookup—into a spiral of lies he can't outrun. Then Micah Nemerever's These Violent Delights pulls us into 1970s Pittsburgh, where two college boys fall into a Leopold-and-Loeb style obsession that gets exactly as ugly as it sounds. We dig into gay obsession, codependency dressed up as devotion, and the strange pleasure of watching it all fall apart. Lock the door behind you.

This episode, Chuck Tingle's Bury Your Gays drags the infamous trope into the light—and gives it teeth. When gay screenwriter Misha refuses to kill off his queer characters for "the algorithm," very literal monsters show up to register their disapproval. We dig into Hollywood's body count, horror as survival, and the refreshingly normal boyfriend keeping it all from full-blown dread. Bring a nightlight and an open heart—you're going to need both.e