What do you think?
Rate this book
A Different Love
When Billy and Hal accidentally meet in the small midwestern town where they live, it doesn't take long for them to fall in love. Despite their difference in age and backgrounds, they both feel sure that this relationship is destined to last. The petty prejudice of their neighbors makes it impossible to stay in their home town, so Billy and Hal move to San Francisco. There, Hal's rugged handsomeness and Billy's youthful good looks create problems that the two had never anticipated. Soon, love seems a lot more complicated than it did before.
Paperback
First published August 1, 1983
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 31, 2025
An historical artefact from 1983 and never reprinted: a young gay couple move to the city to escape persecution, but as one of the more jaundiced characters says, ‘Of all the places in the world for a couple of hicks to bring their true love… San Francisco is a place to go wild, not steady.’ This short novel traces the survival – or not – of their connection. It is described on the title page as ‘a gay romance,’ which pinpoints the difference between then and now: this is a story written by a gay man for other gay men rather than an M/M romance by a female author for an audience of predominantly straight women; that wasn’t a thing forty years ago.
The prose is plain and the characters familiar types; nothing particularly unexpected happens and rarely is anything witty or idiosyncratic said (although a man urges another to resume their casual no-strings relationship with the line, ‘You and I can still trick once in a while. It doesn’t have to get Wagnerian.’). None the less, I liked it: the book is extremely readable, as well as holding interest as an authentic document of the past. A night on a swanky yacht consists in part of ‘dancing to taped music.’ Nobody is trans and instead, after a friendly encounter with a local drag performer, Baker, we get an exchange of dialogue between a barman and one of the newcomers that echoes the findings of the pre-revisionist historians of the Stonewall uprising:
Harold said, ‘I can’t understand why any man would want to dress up in women’s clothes.’
‘Neither do I,’ said Frank. ‘And neither does Baker.’
… ‘Do those types come in here?’
‘Not very often. A lot of the other customers don’t like drags. Same in a lot of bars.’
Despite the date, AIDS goes unmentioned, possibly because it would have been too disruptive to the mood, too large for the narrative’s modest scope. Clay Larkin is very much not trying to write the great gay novel of his era, but to entertain and divert, which is refreshing. He must have been a romantic in real life, since the book is dedicated to perhaps its most sympathetic and lovelorn character:
To “Frank,” wherever he may be
The prose is plain and the characters familiar types; nothing particularly unexpected happens and rarely is anything witty or idiosyncratic said (although a man urges another to resume their casual no-strings relationship with the line, ‘You and I can still trick once in a while. It doesn’t have to get Wagnerian.’). None the less, I liked it: the book is extremely readable, as well as holding interest as an authentic document of the past. A night on a swanky yacht consists in part of ‘dancing to taped music.’ Nobody is trans and instead, after a friendly encounter with a local drag performer, Baker, we get an exchange of dialogue between a barman and one of the newcomers that echoes the findings of the pre-revisionist historians of the Stonewall uprising:
Harold said, ‘I can’t understand why any man would want to dress up in women’s clothes.’
‘Neither do I,’ said Frank. ‘And neither does Baker.’
… ‘Do those types come in here?’
‘Not very often. A lot of the other customers don’t like drags. Same in a lot of bars.’
Despite the date, AIDS goes unmentioned, possibly because it would have been too disruptive to the mood, too large for the narrative’s modest scope. Clay Larkin is very much not trying to write the great gay novel of his era, but to entertain and divert, which is refreshing. He must have been a romantic in real life, since the book is dedicated to perhaps its most sympathetic and lovelorn character:
To “Frank,” wherever he may be
August 30, 2026
Aww :) it wasn’t that good but it was still cute, 2.5 rounded up for being charmingly hamfisted
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews