Landscape In Lavender: A Young Man's Search For His Gay Identity

by Brooks Kolb

For readers of Armistead Maupin’s Logical Family, a heartfelt coming-out and coming-of-age story of a young man uniting his divided self and finding proof of eternal love’s existence.

When society is primed to regard you as an outcast even before a sexually transmitted disease starts killing your gay brothers, coming out of the closet is hard enough—but even that is only the first step. Afterward, it can be challenging to cultivate self-respect, let alone find the lasting love you deserve and the home you crave. 

In this earnest, hopeful memoir, Brooks Kolb explores the conflict between his personal and professional identities as he traces his round trip journey from Seattle to Paris, Philadelphia, London, and San Francisco against the backdrop of the 1970s sexual revolution and the devastating AIDS pandemic that followed. During his travels, Brooks becomes a landscape architect, comes out of the closet, crosses racial barriers to win lasting love, loses that love, and finds belonging. Along the way he learns that freedom demands that one construct their own morality in the face of social ostracism, that loss is an inherent attribute of love, and that the need to belong can be just as urgent as the need for love.

Heartbreaking but ultimately inspiring, Landscape in Lavender will charm readers across generations—LGBTQ+, cisgender, and straight alike—who struggle, or have struggled, to live a truly authentic life.

Genres: Memoir

328 pages, Paperback

Expected publication June 23, 2026

Reviews

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Garden of the Divided Self
In “Landscape In Lavender,” Brooks Kolb turns coming out, interracial love, AIDS grief, and landscape architecture into one long search for a livable design.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 23rd, 2026

A landscape architect learns to distrust polite surfaces. A meadow may be wetland. A view may cost more exposure than it is worth. A graceful slope may be waiting, with excellent manners, to send the whole project sliding downhill.

Brooks Kolb’s “Landscape In Lavender” brings that trained suspicion to the self. Its most resistant site is not a garden, plaza, campus, or park, but a life graded by inherited blueprints that no longer fit the body: masculinity, family expectation, professional ambition, racial innocence, sexual secrecy, romance, grief. Kolb knows how to design landscapes. He has to learn which parts of love and loss refuse design.

That is why “Landscape In Lavender” outgrows its subtitle, “A Young Man’s Search For His Gay Identity,” without betraying it. This is a coming-out story with a long aftershock. The closet door opens, yes, but the book is more interested in what happens after the door has done its theatrical little swing. Where does the newly visible person live? What must he carry from the old rooms into the new ones? A door can open onto a dance floor, a hospital room, a city where no one knows your name, or a home you cannot yet recognize as home.

The first half, “Open the Closet Door,” moves Kolb through Seattle, Paris, Philadelphia, and London as if each city were handing him a costume that fit badly in a new place. His father, Keith, an eminent modernist architect, casts a long professional shadow over the childhood chapters. He lectures, instructs, praises design, imposes standards, and loves his son through a fog of expectation. The family’s white wood-and-glass house in Seattle becomes one of the memoir’s governing structures: handsome, exposed, admired, vulnerable, egged by neighborhood children, a shelter that is also a display case. No wonder Kolb becomes alert to facades, windows, approaches, and the danger of being seen too clearly.

Childhood and adolescence are scored through small humiliations with long afterlives. A cowboy suit given by his father teaches him that masculinity can feel fraudulent before it feels possible. Later, as an adult in Philadelphia, he buys cowboy boots and a hat, then walks home in shame, as if the costume itself has accused him of impersonating a man. He notices men and calls the feeling admiration. He recoils from women who desire him and calls the recoil hunger, politeness, timing, anything but the fact his body had been announcing for years. A young woman pulls him down onto a rug; he announces that he is starving. One wants to hand the poor boy a sandwich and a revelation.

Kolb is best when comedy does not soften pain so much as make it easier to see. The younger Brooks is anxious, literal, vain, rule-bound, observant, and so late to his own weather that the reader begins checking the sky. The older narrator looks back with tenderness, but not with acquittal. He knows when he was ridiculous. He knows when he was cowardly. He knows when innocence was only a more comfortable name for ignorance. That warm but firm pressure saves the book from becoming a procession of grievances. Kolb is not merely reporting that shame harmed him. He is showing how eagerly shame recruited him as its junior assistant.

The prose, at its best, has the shapely abundance of a person who has spent his life looking at sites before judging them. Kolb notices the slope of streets, the color of doors, the behavior of windows, the light on water, the arrangement of chairs, the social meaning of a bar entrance, the emotional weather of an apartment. Philadelphia is brick, ambition, segregation, offices, and an unmarked door. San Francisco is fog, hills, appetite, permission, and dread. Oakland is warmth, mixture, balcony, lake, family. Seattle is rain, return, parents, and the possibility of being seen without partitions. The descriptive passages do not merely dress the life; they disclose its terms.

His first great threshold arrives in Philadelphia, across the hall from Ken, the handsome neighbor who initiates him into sex with men and then, with polite, lethal efficiency, declines to become the husband Kolb has already installed in his imagination after one erotic evening. Soon Ken takes him to Equus, the unmarked gay club whose door has been quietly tugging at him for weeks. Inside: stairs, bar, bodies, cologne, sweat, disco, a white dance floor lit from below, Diana Ross singing “I’m Coming Out,” and the bodily relief of no longer pretending not to want what he wants. A thinner book would make this the triumph. Kolb makes it the invoice tucked inside liberation.

Philadelphia’s gay life is a party with a peephole: funny, erotic, passworded, and lonely once the music stops. San Francisco, when Kolb moves there, seems at first to promise the full-scale version: more men, more bars, more permission, more weather for reinvention. Yet the city he initially misreads as medicine has its own side effects. Nobody knows him, which is thrilling until it becomes anonymity. The Castro offers spectacle and sexual possibility, but not necessarily shelter. The I-Beam, the Pendulum, Badlands, the Eagle, the Folsom bars – each gives him a costume that briefly passes for freedom, and each leaves him, sooner or later, changing back into himself.

Kolb writes about cruising as someone who remembers both the charge of pursuit and the morning-after inventory: clothes, silence, self-reproach, door. Sex is neither punished nor crowned. It is allowed to be appetite, education, vanity, solace, and evasion. The pursuit teaches him something true while also keeping him from other truths. That is the book’s refusal of easy moral sorting. Desire can be a compass and a decoy at the same time.

His relationship with Chad, a charismatic Black man from Pennsylvania, brings the book onto ground wired to old American voltage. Kolb does not use interracial desire as a decorative sign of openness. He worries it, sometimes productively and sometimes awkwardly, as a fact inseparable from class, secrecy, privilege, fetishization, and abandonment. Chad is hidden from parts of Kolb’s work life. A Philadelphia landlord refuses to rent to him after hearing his surname. In San Francisco, a white roommate chills the air around him. Black and White Men Together gives Kolb language for questions he had previously felt only as static. That reckoning matters because it is candid even when it remains unresolved. Its honesty lies less in solving the discomfort than in refusing to make it decorous.

The politics enter through doors – who opens them, who hesitates, who is waved through, who is turned away. A partner not brought to the office party is not only a personal omission. A lover with no secure legal status beside a hospital bed is not only a historical detail. An HIV diagnosis delivered badly over the phone is not only one clinic’s failure. Kolb’s life passes through public systems even when the prose stays intimate: workplaces, landlords, hospitals, city politics, queer organizations, families, and the soft violence of being tolerated only in pieces.

Then James Draper enters, and the book stops strutting and begins listening.

Kolb meets James at a Black and White Men Together meeting, where James stands in army fatigues, light-brown eyes bright with shyness and merriment. Their first date is not at a club but at the Japanese Garden in Golden Gate Park, a choice so quiet it feels almost radical after so many bars. James is funny, gentle, mischievous, vulnerable, and stubborn. He works at Mother’s Cookies and arrives at Kolb’s apartment in a white apron dusted with sugar, “one giant cookie just emerging from the oven.” That image might have curdled in another writer’s hands; here it becomes exactly what love often is in memory: a little silly, deeply physical, impossible to replace.

Their move to Oakland gives the narrative the first room where it can stop performing. The apartment on Santa Clara Avenue, the balcony, the jade plant, Lake Merritt, Sunday afternoons with the Draper family, grocery shopping, jazz clubs, Alcatraz, dinners, walks – these are not filler scenes of coupledom. They are the book’s answer to the false glamour of boundless liberty. Oakland offers what San Francisco could not: neighborhood scale, racial mixture, family, recognition, a place where two men can be more than silhouettes in nightclub light. Kolb’s life with James is not idealized. There are conflicts over race, church, family, temperament, and illness. Kolb can be analytical when James needs simple tenderness. James can be wounded and withholding. But their love is lived in rooms, errands, food, jokes, and routines, and that is why it holds weight.

Kolb is also good at portraiture drawn in two gestures and one perfect accessory. Birgyte, worshipper of Passion, brandishes a cigarette holder like a wand. Laurie Olin sketches gorgeous “notions” while not quite answering the practical question asked of him. Beverly exhales judgment through cigarette smoke. Chad bats his eyelashes and calls Kolb “bo-fre.” James turns a grocery cart into a private comedy routine. These pages are full of nicknames, outfits, songs, foods, cars, bars, offices, and rooms. Memory comes dressed, and sometimes overdressed, which is part of its charm.

The book’s obvious literary neighbors include “Borrowed Time” by Paul Monette and “Logical Family” by Armistead Maupin, though both comparisons require care. Kolb’s temperament is less fierce and compressed than Monette’s, more rueful, scenic, and explanatory. He shares Maupin’s affection for queer kinship and San Francisco self-invention, but “Landscape In Lavender” is more spatially preoccupied and more domestic in its final ache. Kolb is not only asking how gay men found one another after Stonewall and before AIDS remade the map. He is asking what kind of room love leaves behind when the beloved is gone.

The HIV test result cleaves the book.

Kolb is negative. James is positive. Fate becomes brutally grammatical.

Kolb is unsparing about the shabby, human arithmetic of survival: relief curdled by guilt, fear dressed as practicality, the wish to be a good caregiver before one knows how much goodness one possesses. James’s illness moves through pneumocystis, AZT, neuropathy, exhaustion, hospitalizations, and dread. The medical world becomes another prison, one with waiting rooms instead of cells and lab numbers instead of bars. What lingers are objects that refuse to leave: James asking, again and again, “Would ja rub ma feet?”; James, unable to speak, writing “Ice” in a ragged script; James’s lunch bags marked “J” and “B”; the green scraps on which he seems to have counted the days he managed to live.

Here the memoir’s abundance turns grave. Earlier, Kolb’s descriptive appetite can seem nearly unstoppable, as if every apartment, classmate, professor, bar, street, and song must be preserved against erasure. In the AIDS chapters, that impulse becomes not indulgence but ethics. To remember James is to remember his apron, his jokes, his family, his work on Alcatraz, his stubbornness about Oakland, his wish for marriage, his hurt over church, his tenderness, his anger, his fear. The book understands that the dead are not honored by being turned into symbols too quickly. They must first be allowed their habits.

That does not mean “Landscape In Lavender” is shapeless. Its two-part structure, “Open the Closet Door” and “Open Your Golden Gate,” sounds like sequential liberation, almost a self-help program with better scenery. Kolb complicates both. The closet opens, but shame lingers. The Golden Gate opens, but San Francisco brings anonymity, temptation, racial unease, AIDS, and grief. Many chapter titles are places or social nodes: “Low-Rise North,” “Equus,” “The I-Beam,” “The Pendulum,” “Black and White Men Together,” “Alcatraz,” “570 Mira Vista,” “The Leschi Lake Cafe.” The life is organized by rooms entered, streets crossed, bars braved, offices endured, bridges survived.

The cost of that abundance is overgrowth. Kolb sometimes labels the garden after planting it. A symbol arrives, blooms perfectly well, and then receives a small plaque explaining its species, origin, and intended emotional effect. The divided self, the ache for recognition, the difference between lust and love, the price of permission – all matter, but the book repeats them with more insistence than necessary. The middle chapters accumulate jobs, lovers, bars, apartments, professional episodes, and reflective summaries in a way that is true to life but occasionally slack as art. Kolb’s instinct is preservation. One’s editorial hand, less nobly but sometimes usefully, reaches for shears.

The prose has a related habit. Kolb’s sentences often move in generous, sequential arcs: he observes, remembers, qualifies, reconsiders, and then explains what the scene has taught him. That rhythm can be hospitable; it gives the reader the companionable feeling of walking beside someone who has had years to think about every turn in the path. It can also overcaption the strongest moments. The Mother’s Cookies apron, the green counting papers, the little lunch bags, the closed apartment doors, the bars gone quiet after AIDS – these do not need much interpretation. They are already speaking.

Still, the memoir’s occasional overexplicitness is inseparable from its vulnerability. Kolb is not a minimalist. He is a man trying to save the evidence. He distrusts erasure because he has lived through too much of it: the erasure of gay childhood, the erasure of queer public life behind unmarked doors, the erasure of Black experience by white innocence, the erasure of lovers by disease, the erasure of partners by law and custom, the erasure of the dead when no quilt panel is granted. If he sometimes keeps too much, the impulse is not vanity. It is witness.

The final movement comes dangerously close to arranging grief too neatly, then saves itself by trusting objects more than explanations. After James dies, Kolb writes letters to him, receives what he understands as a visitation, dates too soon, misplaces keys, circles back through old bars, and gradually recognizes that the Bay Area can no longer hold him. Returning to Seattle might have read as defeat. Instead, because James has urged it and because a new mentor sees him as a person without partitions rather than a professional résumé with a private life attached, the return becomes a relocation of grief rather than a cure.

This is the book’s deepest pattern: Kolb keeps mistaking freedom for arrival. Philadelphia gives him work and secrecy. San Francisco gives him permission and loneliness. Oakland gives him love and loss. Seattle gives him not innocence restored, but a receiving ground. Each place corrects the fantasy the previous place created. Each makes the map larger and less flattering. The result is not a memoir of triumphant self-invention, though it contains triumphs. It is a memoir of self-design and misdesign, of revising the plan after weather, illness, family, racism, desire, and death have all had their say.

I would rate “Landscape In Lavender” 84/100, or 4/5 Goodreads-compatible stars: a strong, emotionally durable memoir whose tenderness lasts even where its borders need pruning.

The title’s lavender finally feels less like color than condition: bruise, dusk, memorial tint, the shade of tenderness after pain has had time to weather. The closing sign is almost too neat: a Mother’s Cookies truck idling near the Leschi Market, bearing the face of a grandmother who resembles Kolb’s Nana. James had worked at Mother’s Cookies; Nana has already returned through a psychic message; Seattle is beginning to gather the broken pieces into one field of meaning. Resist it if you like. Grief is rarely tasteful on command. The dead, when we need them badly enough, speak in delivery trucks, lunch bags, wind chimes, songs, old routes, and ordinary objects that refuse to behave ordinarily. Seattle does not solve grief. It gives grief a chair, a window, and someone kind enough not to ask it to leave. Kolb’s final grace is not that he leaves James behind. It is that he finds a site with enough room to carry him home.

[Michael Doane]

Landscape In Lavender is a deeply personal and historically grounded memoir that traces one man’s journey toward identity, belonging, and love against the turbulent backdrop of the late 20th century.

Drawing comparisons to Armistead Maupin’s memoir Logical Family, the book situates itself within a tradition of candid LGBTQ+ storytelling that merges personal narrative with cultural history.

Brooks Kolb charts a life that unfolds across major cultural hubs Seattle, Paris, Philadelphia, London, and San Francisco each location contributing to his evolving sense of self. His professional path as a landscape architect becomes a subtle metaphor for the emotional terrain he must shape and reshape as he navigates identity, relationships, and loss.

The memoir’s emotional core lies in its confrontation with the AIDS crisis, a period that profoundly altered the trajectory of queer life. The narrative does not shy away from grief, depicting love found across boundaries racial, social, and internal and then painfully lost. Yet the story ultimately leans toward resilience, emphasizing that identity is not discovered once but constructed over time.

Key thematic pillars include:

• Coming out and internalized conflict
• The search for belonging across cultures
• Love, loss, and grief during the AIDS pandemic
• The intersection of personal and professional identity
• Self defined morality in the face of social rejection

At 328 pages, the memoir will strongly resonate with:

• LGBTQ+ readers across generations
• Fans of literary memoirs and identity narratives
• Readers interested in AIDS-era history
• Book clubs focused on resilience and authenticity
• Readers of travel infused personal narratives

Landscape In Lavender stands out for its scope it is both intimate and expansive, personal yet historically anchored.

[Nick Artrip · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received an eARC of Landscape In Lavender: A Young Man's Search For His Gay Identity by Brooks Kolb via NetGalley. In this earnest memoir, Brooks Kolb explores the conflict between his personal and professional identities as he traces his journey from Seattle to Paris, Philadelphia, London, and San Francisco against the backdrop of the sexual revolution and the AIDS pandemic. Throughout his travels, Brooks becomes a landscape architect, reckons with his own sexuality and comes out of the closest, and learns many valuable lessons along the way.

This was a wonderful memoir that I really enjoyed for a number of reasons. I have a deep appreciation for how candid Kolb is about the development of his own morality and the influences in his life. Landscape in Lavender is a testament to queer resilience and the ways we fight to live as our most authentic selves. The last third in particular carried a real emotional weight that hit me like a ton of bricks.
Further thoughts will be shared closer to publication.

[Lauren B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to Netgalley and reviewers for a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
This was an interesting insight to a man's queer journey through the AIDS epidemic.
I found this an enjoyable read, and something that an American with an interest in landscape architecture would really appreciate. I didn't know many of the works he was involved in, and I think someone with a passion in that area would really relate to this story.