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How Long Has This Been Going On?
How Long Has This Been Going On? brings together a rich and varied cast of characters to tell the tale of modern gay America in this remarkable epic novel. Beginning in 1949 and moving to the present day, Mordden puts a unique and innovating spin on modern history. An adventurous, adroit, and fascinating novel by one of the finest gay writers of our time.
590 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews
June 13, 2007
Fiction. You know that feeling you get when you're reading a book and stubbornly wishing that the characters were gay even though you know you're only going to be disappointed? I really didn't have that problem here. Everyone in it is gay: the insecure cop working vice, the Kid putting on a burlesque act at Thriller Jill's, the golden best friends who wrestle on the floor. Gay gay gay.
The story tears through almost fifty years of gay life, from 1949 to 1991, bouncing back and forth between Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minnesota, New York City, and New Hampshire. The book itself takes nearly that long to read. The hardback is 600 pages long and skips wildly through the years, collecting more characters than an Agatha Christie novel, more sex and death, too, but no handy character guide in the front. You can't start this book and then put it down for two weeks before picking it up again because you won't remember who Johnna is and if you're supposed to recognize Desmond or what the difference between Jim and Henry was. It needs to be read quickly because all these characters run into each other at some point in their lives, all tied together by ex-lovers or old jobs and new cities.
It's an experimental narrative that flits between characters, perspectives, and even tenses. There are internal monologues in a variety of POVs, the speakers sometimes impossible to discern, and a mysterious first person narrator that pops up from time to time to provide knowing commentary in an ironic, omniscient voice, sounding like nothing so much as Kilgore Trout or possibly Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. himself.
Normally I wouldn't put up with that kind of crazy trickery from a book, but, like Vonnegut, Mordden makes it necessary. It's jarring, but masterful. You feel like he has a reason for it, a reason good enough to excuse it, explain it. The book sucks you in and by the time the narrative weirdness becomes a fixture, you're sunk because the characters, all six billion of them, are engaging, flawed, hungry, and confused. You keep reading because you want to know what happens to them.
The book has a teasing tone, a huge vocabulary, a romantic soul, a hopeless nature, a relentless drive into the future. It's all about the clock of history ticking away. It starts in a time before there's even such a thing as "gay." It creates gay and then moves on to police busts, falling in love with your best friend in a small town, Stonewall, dance halls, gay porn, AIDS. Its final chapter is set in New York in 1991 during Pride week, a series of vignettes filled with characters we know and people we've never met before. For every relationship it breaks up, it builds two new ones. It's a huge novel with a sense of epic exhaustion and strained hope, and it's an amazing trip.
The story tears through almost fifty years of gay life, from 1949 to 1991, bouncing back and forth between Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minnesota, New York City, and New Hampshire. The book itself takes nearly that long to read. The hardback is 600 pages long and skips wildly through the years, collecting more characters than an Agatha Christie novel, more sex and death, too, but no handy character guide in the front. You can't start this book and then put it down for two weeks before picking it up again because you won't remember who Johnna is and if you're supposed to recognize Desmond or what the difference between Jim and Henry was. It needs to be read quickly because all these characters run into each other at some point in their lives, all tied together by ex-lovers or old jobs and new cities.
It's an experimental narrative that flits between characters, perspectives, and even tenses. There are internal monologues in a variety of POVs, the speakers sometimes impossible to discern, and a mysterious first person narrator that pops up from time to time to provide knowing commentary in an ironic, omniscient voice, sounding like nothing so much as Kilgore Trout or possibly Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. himself.
Normally I wouldn't put up with that kind of crazy trickery from a book, but, like Vonnegut, Mordden makes it necessary. It's jarring, but masterful. You feel like he has a reason for it, a reason good enough to excuse it, explain it. The book sucks you in and by the time the narrative weirdness becomes a fixture, you're sunk because the characters, all six billion of them, are engaging, flawed, hungry, and confused. You keep reading because you want to know what happens to them.
The book has a teasing tone, a huge vocabulary, a romantic soul, a hopeless nature, a relentless drive into the future. It's all about the clock of history ticking away. It starts in a time before there's even such a thing as "gay." It creates gay and then moves on to police busts, falling in love with your best friend in a small town, Stonewall, dance halls, gay porn, AIDS. Its final chapter is set in New York in 1991 during Pride week, a series of vignettes filled with characters we know and people we've never met before. For every relationship it breaks up, it builds two new ones. It's a huge novel with a sense of epic exhaustion and strained hope, and it's an amazing trip.
March 3, 2022
An ambitious, sweeping novel, grand in scope and achievement.
This is a big book, almost 600 pages, with many characters, and for me it was just the right book at the right time. I did have trouble at times remembering who someone was (Derek Archer? who was he 400 pages ago?) but overall I have to say that I loved this beautiful book.
Years of history, decades of context; challenging to bring the reader along without losing them, or moving the characters around like puppets. If you are in the mood for a novel on a grander scale, with gay themes and an overview of history, this book is highly recommended.
This is a big book, almost 600 pages, with many characters, and for me it was just the right book at the right time. I did have trouble at times remembering who someone was (Derek Archer? who was he 400 pages ago?) but overall I have to say that I loved this beautiful book.
Years of history, decades of context; challenging to bring the reader along without losing them, or moving the characters around like puppets. If you are in the mood for a novel on a grander scale, with gay themes and an overview of history, this book is highly recommended.
December 24, 2015
Sadly, I was not swept away. For a book with a title so desperate, one would expect to hear something profound! How long has it all been going on? What is "this" anyway? Did "this" really start only in the 1950s? Was there nothing before? Do the characters, often contrived, have much to say about "this"?
Gay history is a tricky subject, one that is often shrouded in mystery and myth. Before Stonewall, it seems, it was mostly lived underground, never documented. Larry Kramer attempted to capture all of gay history in his The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart: A Novel, though poorly. This novel tries to do the similarly, but in its effort to check all the relevant boxes, fails to put together a good story. Mordden seems, to quote a passage, a "[..] misguidedly idealistic author who can't see that an unconventional way of living is not in itself a foundation for good writing". If only said author had listened to himself! The various chapters seem glued together, we skip 8 years from the late-70s to the mid-80s but it's as if our heroes haven't lived for more than a week. There seems to be little character development, save the nominal "maturing". Except for the hostage scene in the latter part of the book, our heroes do little that is unexpected. Our narrator often interrupts the narrative to speak in first person and contemplate the meaning of what he has written, which felt very awkward to me.
So I ask, How Long Until Someone Writes A Good Novel About "This"?
Gay history is a tricky subject, one that is often shrouded in mystery and myth. Before Stonewall, it seems, it was mostly lived underground, never documented. Larry Kramer attempted to capture all of gay history in his The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart: A Novel, though poorly. This novel tries to do the similarly, but in its effort to check all the relevant boxes, fails to put together a good story. Mordden seems, to quote a passage, a "[..] misguidedly idealistic author who can't see that an unconventional way of living is not in itself a foundation for good writing". If only said author had listened to himself! The various chapters seem glued together, we skip 8 years from the late-70s to the mid-80s but it's as if our heroes haven't lived for more than a week. There seems to be little character development, save the nominal "maturing". Except for the hostage scene in the latter part of the book, our heroes do little that is unexpected. Our narrator often interrupts the narrative to speak in first person and contemplate the meaning of what he has written, which felt very awkward to me.
So I ask, How Long Until Someone Writes A Good Novel About "This"?
December 11, 2014
I read this for it's inclusion on "AfterElton’s 50 Best Gay Books" and it's length, hoping for a sweeping gay saga I wouldn't want to put down, as some reviews have suggested. This is not that.
The book starts well, illustrating gay life in the 1950's in a straight-forward way, though not always factual. At one point characters say:
"Coming out?"
"Of the closet."
The closet didn't exist in the 1950's. As the book Masked Voices: Gay Men and Lesbians in Cold War America makes clear, Coming Out meant coming out to gay life, dropping the mask of heterosexuality and coming out to often the bar and being your true self. The idea of coming out of the closet and of coming out to family and friends didn't exist in the 1950's.
The book continues in an interesting and slightly gossipy vein until about the 20% mark when we switch to the late 1950's and with it comes a narrator from nowhere:
"The gay history meter is running, and we're looking for signs of life. Let us drop in on our several friends, and meet some new ones."
Who does he think he is, Charles Dickens? The sudden narrator is not the way to change scenes. On top of this we get a new story about the "twins" and their relationship in small town America which really brings any momentum to a roaring halt. I couldn't wait to get past this scene and on to the old characters, but really the magic never comes back. The narrator stays and with him comes really obscure second hand references that are indecipherable:
"One of your closest friends meets a woman and moves in with her, and now you and your lover have to come to dinner. It does not go well. Perhaps the womanly intimacy that you and your lover so obviously share with your old friend threatens the fourth woman;"
This along with notes to the reader really drag you out of the narrative:
"Those of my readers who savored the heady atmosphere of Thriller Jill's and Hero's might resent the plain-Jane air of the Magic Parrot: but this is the Midwest."
The notes continue:
"It's Frank, of course; you knew that, though he's a stranger to Tom."
As do the coded messages:
"Poor Walt: so happy with Blue, and so frustrated. Why do we always seek to change the people we love? Reform them, cure them? Sure, there's tension when two don't agree. But is it not more advisable to learn to live in peaceful disagreement than to war over who shall be brought to book, forced to "agree"?"
And as any allegiance you may have had to any of the characters crumbles, we hit Stonewall and AIDS, two major times in gay life and really the reason to write a book like this.
I didn't highlight the Stonewall treatment but it's played out something like "later, if we could go back and ask our characters what happened that night, here's what each of them would say" with a list of names followed by a couple of bullet points. What's the point of reading a fictional history of gay life if you are not going to make any attempt at weaving Stonewall into the story?
As for AIDS, the book skips it entirely, jumping from 1979 to 1985 where AIDS is already a fact of life. How gays reacted to it, that's not in this book.
I'm at 83% now and I just can't go on. I've read every word so far and I just can't do it anymore. It's become maddening. No narrative, the author talking to his characters, asking them questions:
"Enough of this. Now I want to ask Walt and Blue a comparable question: You think this is love?"
How do you have "a", as in one, comparable question. Where is the comparison? Shouldn't it be "some comparable questions"? And why are you asking your characters questions at all, who's telling the story here, who's manning the ship????
I'll tell you who. No one.
One more. After some dialogue, the author says, to whomever:
"Okay, boys, now stop re-creating vicious patterns and get the rules down.
They didn't alas."
You're talking to your characters and then answering yourself! Maddening! The worst part of this book is that it starts out kind of well before dissolving into this unreadable jumble, but don't be fooled. Avoid.
The original cover also seems to show people of colour. Who knows where they went.
The book starts well, illustrating gay life in the 1950's in a straight-forward way, though not always factual. At one point characters say:
"Coming out?"
"Of the closet."
The closet didn't exist in the 1950's. As the book Masked Voices: Gay Men and Lesbians in Cold War America makes clear, Coming Out meant coming out to gay life, dropping the mask of heterosexuality and coming out to often the bar and being your true self. The idea of coming out of the closet and of coming out to family and friends didn't exist in the 1950's.
The book continues in an interesting and slightly gossipy vein until about the 20% mark when we switch to the late 1950's and with it comes a narrator from nowhere:
"The gay history meter is running, and we're looking for signs of life. Let us drop in on our several friends, and meet some new ones."
Who does he think he is, Charles Dickens? The sudden narrator is not the way to change scenes. On top of this we get a new story about the "twins" and their relationship in small town America which really brings any momentum to a roaring halt. I couldn't wait to get past this scene and on to the old characters, but really the magic never comes back. The narrator stays and with him comes really obscure second hand references that are indecipherable:
"One of your closest friends meets a woman and moves in with her, and now you and your lover have to come to dinner. It does not go well. Perhaps the womanly intimacy that you and your lover so obviously share with your old friend threatens the fourth woman;"
This along with notes to the reader really drag you out of the narrative:
"Those of my readers who savored the heady atmosphere of Thriller Jill's and Hero's might resent the plain-Jane air of the Magic Parrot: but this is the Midwest."
The notes continue:
"It's Frank, of course; you knew that, though he's a stranger to Tom."
As do the coded messages:
"Poor Walt: so happy with Blue, and so frustrated. Why do we always seek to change the people we love? Reform them, cure them? Sure, there's tension when two don't agree. But is it not more advisable to learn to live in peaceful disagreement than to war over who shall be brought to book, forced to "agree"?"
And as any allegiance you may have had to any of the characters crumbles, we hit Stonewall and AIDS, two major times in gay life and really the reason to write a book like this.
I didn't highlight the Stonewall treatment but it's played out something like "later, if we could go back and ask our characters what happened that night, here's what each of them would say" with a list of names followed by a couple of bullet points. What's the point of reading a fictional history of gay life if you are not going to make any attempt at weaving Stonewall into the story?
As for AIDS, the book skips it entirely, jumping from 1979 to 1985 where AIDS is already a fact of life. How gays reacted to it, that's not in this book.
I'm at 83% now and I just can't go on. I've read every word so far and I just can't do it anymore. It's become maddening. No narrative, the author talking to his characters, asking them questions:
"Enough of this. Now I want to ask Walt and Blue a comparable question: You think this is love?"
How do you have "a", as in one, comparable question. Where is the comparison? Shouldn't it be "some comparable questions"? And why are you asking your characters questions at all, who's telling the story here, who's manning the ship????
I'll tell you who. No one.
One more. After some dialogue, the author says, to whomever:
"Okay, boys, now stop re-creating vicious patterns and get the rules down.
They didn't alas."
You're talking to your characters and then answering yourself! Maddening! The worst part of this book is that it starts out kind of well before dissolving into this unreadable jumble, but don't be fooled. Avoid.
The original cover also seems to show people of colour. Who knows where they went.
July 13, 2012
This is a classic novel, as well as a gay classic novel. This is the best novel describing the development of gay culture in the USA since the Second World War. Yet, all its literature quality makes it a) very readable and b) very readable for everyone (straight, gay or otherwise). I have once described this a compendium of American gay life; the poshest word I could come up with and rightly so. But forget all that and let Ethan Mordden take you on a literary journey. Highly Recommended Reading!
October 9, 2014
How Long Has This Been Going On? by Ethan Mordden is an ambitious, sweeping and panoramic 600 page epic novel that traces LGBT history over a 40+ year span through the lives of a broad cast of characters. The story opens in 1949 at Thriller Jill’s, a Los Angeles gay nightclub where patrons needed to be very discreet; it concludes with the 1991 New York City Gay Pride Parade. Along the way, the story takes the reader to San Francisco, small-town Minnesota and New Hampshire, and of course covers the 1969 Stonewall riots and AIDS.
I came out as a gay man in 1976 and have certainly seen a huge attitudinal change toward gay men and lesbians in the mindset of American culture during my life. I am also old enough to know how repressive American culture was to the LGBT community during the post World War II era and for many years thereafter. Mordden does an impressive job describing just how bleak that world was and how hard the fight was to accomplish the changes many of us today take for granted.
The author introduces us to a cast of wonderfully drawn and very diverse characters. Most notable among them:
*Frank, the closeted vice cop at the story’s beginning, who later becomes a gay porno star. He is one of the novel’s most memorable characters.
*Lois, the no-nonsense lesbian owner of Thriller Jill’s and her eventual partner Elaine. Elaine is married when we first meet her and eventually becomes a successful writer.
*Luke and Tom ” the Twins”, childhood friends from small-town Minnesota whose lives become complicated when sexual longings begin to color their relationship.
*Luke and Tom’s close female friend Chris, the primary straight character in the story. She later moves to New York and achieves fame.
*Walt, Tom’s nephew who grows from a young boy to a grown man.
*Blue a teenage hustler from West Virginia.
*and the unforgettable Johnny the Kid, the charismatic, cocky & talented singer/cabaret performer who in Chapter 1 is a 17 year-old and is approaching 60 by the time the story ends.
Many other fascinating characters are introduced throughout the book. Some both major and minor perish along the way; others survive to the end. There is an ever-shifting change of focus from one chapter to the next as the reader is regularly introduced to new individuals. In the hands of someone less skillful this shifting perspective might get muddled; Mordden however succeeds in making it work. He uses a good mix of humor, sadness and pathos, infusing a sense of life and realism to the story as we join him and his characters in their journeys.
The opening sentence sets the stage for giving the reader the sense that one is looking back from the present to a distant time and place. “In the days when men were men and women adored them, there was a club called Thriller Jill’s on a side street off Hollywood Boulevard”. While primarily told from the third person POV, periodically this changes and it gradually becomes apparent that this is one person’s recollections of these events. That person’s identity is not revealed until the last pages.
While a long book, I never found myself wishing it would end. Each character’s story is fascinating and how their collective lives become intertwined made me want to keep reading. For anyone trying to understand the sea of change that happened within the LGBT community over this time period you need look no further than here. This was clearly one of the best books I read in 2014.
I came out as a gay man in 1976 and have certainly seen a huge attitudinal change toward gay men and lesbians in the mindset of American culture during my life. I am also old enough to know how repressive American culture was to the LGBT community during the post World War II era and for many years thereafter. Mordden does an impressive job describing just how bleak that world was and how hard the fight was to accomplish the changes many of us today take for granted.
The author introduces us to a cast of wonderfully drawn and very diverse characters. Most notable among them:
*Frank, the closeted vice cop at the story’s beginning, who later becomes a gay porno star. He is one of the novel’s most memorable characters.
*Lois, the no-nonsense lesbian owner of Thriller Jill’s and her eventual partner Elaine. Elaine is married when we first meet her and eventually becomes a successful writer.
*Luke and Tom ” the Twins”, childhood friends from small-town Minnesota whose lives become complicated when sexual longings begin to color their relationship.
*Luke and Tom’s close female friend Chris, the primary straight character in the story. She later moves to New York and achieves fame.
*Walt, Tom’s nephew who grows from a young boy to a grown man.
*Blue a teenage hustler from West Virginia.
*and the unforgettable Johnny the Kid, the charismatic, cocky & talented singer/cabaret performer who in Chapter 1 is a 17 year-old and is approaching 60 by the time the story ends.
Many other fascinating characters are introduced throughout the book. Some both major and minor perish along the way; others survive to the end. There is an ever-shifting change of focus from one chapter to the next as the reader is regularly introduced to new individuals. In the hands of someone less skillful this shifting perspective might get muddled; Mordden however succeeds in making it work. He uses a good mix of humor, sadness and pathos, infusing a sense of life and realism to the story as we join him and his characters in their journeys.
The opening sentence sets the stage for giving the reader the sense that one is looking back from the present to a distant time and place. “In the days when men were men and women adored them, there was a club called Thriller Jill’s on a side street off Hollywood Boulevard”. While primarily told from the third person POV, periodically this changes and it gradually becomes apparent that this is one person’s recollections of these events. That person’s identity is not revealed until the last pages.
While a long book, I never found myself wishing it would end. Each character’s story is fascinating and how their collective lives become intertwined made me want to keep reading. For anyone trying to understand the sea of change that happened within the LGBT community over this time period you need look no further than here. This was clearly one of the best books I read in 2014.
June 8, 2007
What Lassie? Timmy's trapped down the well and he's gay? That's what it felt like to read How Long Has This Been Going On? It is supposedly a well written epic of modern American gay history and it certainly has high reviews on Amazon.com but I found it annoying at worst and laughable at best.
The book covers from the end of World War Two through the mid 1990s. A lot happened in that time but I spent so much time rolling my eyes at the characters that I couldn't take the important parts seriously. The story is told in two main ways: in the form of dialogue between a naive character and a his (or her) older lover who has to stop and explain everything.
The second way the story is told is through the overly chatty omniscient narrator. I wanted to slap some duct tape on the narrator's mouth to get him to shut up long enough for the story to actually get somewhere. Some authors can pull off this sort of chit-chat approach to story telling (Christopher Moore and Armistad Maupin for example): Mordden can't. My four-year-old is better at telling this style of story, for goodness sakes!
The book covers from the end of World War Two through the mid 1990s. A lot happened in that time but I spent so much time rolling my eyes at the characters that I couldn't take the important parts seriously. The story is told in two main ways: in the form of dialogue between a naive character and a his (or her) older lover who has to stop and explain everything.
The second way the story is told is through the overly chatty omniscient narrator. I wanted to slap some duct tape on the narrator's mouth to get him to shut up long enough for the story to actually get somewhere. Some authors can pull off this sort of chit-chat approach to story telling (Christopher Moore and Armistad Maupin for example): Mordden can't. My four-year-old is better at telling this style of story, for goodness sakes!
September 16, 2013
Well, a beautiful book, large and generous and witty, beautiful and gripping for all its passing, venial, perhaps inevitable, faults - there's a certain amount of stereotyping, which would be hard to avoid in the kind of large-scale multi-charactered historical sweep this novel goes for and, substantially, achieves, and an idealisation, which is also, in one way, the point of the novel: that gay people are worth it, worth loving, worth the basic freedoms they're (we're) still struggling to ensure, worth each other, finally. It's no accident that the final section is centred on a Gay Pride march, a politico-cultural event that shares these faults and is nevertheless essential. (And don't trust those who say it isn't.) It's a big book, with a big heart and a lively, pungent, not always affectionate, wit, and, in its wary way, optimistic too, and forward-looking. And how perfect that the final narrative voice should be the Kid, who's there at the start and, against all odds, at the end as well.
Oh yes, may we all meet our Blue...or our Walt...
Oh yes, may we all meet our Blue...or our Walt...
July 27, 2025
I loved it and it kept me hooked. There are several love stories and they are followed through 50 years of tribulations. Unfortunately the couple I was sympathizing with didn't have a happy ending, but I guess there's something for everybody in this book. It was hilarious at the beginning and it cracked me up and the good thing is that as it gradually got more sad and serious, it didn't lose it's appeal. I'll re-read it someday for sure.
I re-read it after ten years and I loved it even more. I was able to understand many of the references and the way it was constructed. I was also able to relate to it more after my own gay experiences. Sometimes it feels like cheap gay romance, sometimes as profound insights into the life only we gays can understand. It is entertaining and funny all the way through. I cried a few times and laughed a lot.
I re-read it after ten years and I loved it even more. I was able to understand many of the references and the way it was constructed. I was also able to relate to it more after my own gay experiences. Sometimes it feels like cheap gay romance, sometimes as profound insights into the life only we gays can understand. It is entertaining and funny all the way through. I cried a few times and laughed a lot.
July 21, 2012
This book is so compelling..It is the story of a group of people whose lives touch each others over a period of 30 years or so. the main characters are a lesbian couple, a drag queen, and four gay companions. the book is narrated by one of the characters and what makes it so good is that his actual identity is kept secret until the last few pages so all the while the reader is wondering just who he is. This book is not only a good piece of fiction it is also a slice of gay history in the usa and covers a lot of the major events of the period
December 25, 2013
Long, involved and preachy. Parts were very engaging, but so often in the effort to chronicle 40 years of gay history, characters become wooden, dialogue preachy and expository, events TOO symbolic. Have enjoyed other work of his; this seemed too ambitious.
March 1, 2015
loved this book! great characters, great history. follows gay history from the 30 ' s through the 90 ' s in NY, SF, and Minneapolis, through the lives of an interesting cast of characters.
August 8, 2025
Hard to deny the power of a book (semi-fictionally) chronicling gay history from the 50s through 6 months before I was born, but the major selling point of this Tome is its sheer size/scope and characters... not its quality or ideas or style. A sorta straight-faced (ha ha) historically minded TALES OF THE CITY, extreme readability included. Fun to see some of these characters shift and grow (Frank always compelling, Andy tragic, Walt from annoying to cute) but whew the gay guy misogyny is on full display. (Mordden fucking HATES fag hag Chris, huh?)
April 2, 2009
Mordden's sprawling epic of gay life from the 1930s through the 1990s was a surprisingly easy read and one I found hard to put down. The book focuses on a fairly finite group of people: friends, lovers, patrons of a bar, and follows some of the side trails of their various lives. Though one central storyline that begins mid-novel rang very false to me (it seemed incongruous to the time it described and the characters felt less "real" than those created earlier in the book) I was pretty intently involved throughout. Many of the cultural touchstones Mordden's characters encounter felt exactly right: drag performance, the depth of gay friendships, AIDS, porn, theater, relationships initiated by sex and then negotiated on other terms--I frequently found myself in tears either from nostalgia or familiarity. The book neither took me where I expected it would, nor lingered with me as long afterward as I'd have thought. Nonetheless, I'd recommend it highly.
May 6, 2017
I'm not into gay lit for gay lit's sake. In the same way that I find some exclusively black or Asian minority writing often rather tedious when it deliberately excludes the majority. However, I really like this book and I recommend it to many friends, straight and gay.
It's not just a very expertly sculpted and very human account of the journey from grubby, secretive, 'hole in the basement' bars and anonymous sex afraid of any emotional attachment. It's also a great story to read. In many Western countries the advances and the attitude changes catalogued here have been largely taken for granted. It's good to see how that happened and to explore the human impact of those changes on gay men and women and the people around them.
It's not just a very expertly sculpted and very human account of the journey from grubby, secretive, 'hole in the basement' bars and anonymous sex afraid of any emotional attachment. It's also a great story to read. In many Western countries the advances and the attitude changes catalogued here have been largely taken for granted. It's good to see how that happened and to explore the human impact of those changes on gay men and women and the people around them.
July 7, 2016
This is like Tales of the City, but more serious, with better-drawn characters, and with more pathos. Some character's love stories made me smile -- there is one about an undercover cop, or an anecdote about searching for love in the used pages of a Gore Vidal novel, that is really sweet. Still, there were too many characters to really care about any of them and almost none of the relationships last for more than 100 pages really or make it a novel of character growth or relationships, and it's written in a light hearted tone but it is also a fearless sketch of reality from 1940-1990 and so tragically sad things happen, and it was a bit too much pathos to experience.
June 27, 2018
Ok ... so I have a few notes.. on how to handle this book
1.) block out a weekend and pose bottom through these pages because every 20 pages you have another character offering context and adding layers to the story that makes it hard to keep up with everything if you take breaks
2.) I literally cried from emotion 3 times this book just takes you somewhere you didn’t know you needed to go
3.)Be prepared to become aroused as the most awkward times in the book... the voices of each character can be felt clearly and deeply to the point where you have to remind yourself you are watching a movie ... it’s weird I KNOW... but when you read it you will understand
1.) block out a weekend and pose bottom through these pages because every 20 pages you have another character offering context and adding layers to the story that makes it hard to keep up with everything if you take breaks
2.) I literally cried from emotion 3 times this book just takes you somewhere you didn’t know you needed to go
3.)Be prepared to become aroused as the most awkward times in the book... the voices of each character can be felt clearly and deeply to the point where you have to remind yourself you are watching a movie ... it’s weird I KNOW... but when you read it you will understand
June 5, 2018
I have read this book every june since it was published in 1994, so obviously one of my favorites. The characters are so richly drawn, every time I open it, even though I know EXACTLY what will happen, I read through every word as if it's the first time. And yet I also feel as if i'm spending time with old friends.
October 8, 2007
MOST POIGNANT MOMENT: A terminally ill young man, not having the courage to say good-bye to his lover, arranges for the teddy bear that was once the lover's gift to him to be sent back to him along with a letter (signed by the teddy bear) to break the tragic news of his demise.
Want to read
November 5, 2007Five stars from Punk.
December 8, 2009
Extremely validating and insightful as well as engrossing and entertaining.
February 21, 2012
This book became a friend. I was so sad when it ended. I still pick it up every year or so to read again.
September 17, 2014
This book went on forever and I never wanted it to end.
August 6, 2016
Will re-read because it is an epic novel, more than 175 pages, about humans and society. Is it scandalous and pornographic? No. It is a human novel about us.
Thanks Ethan.
Thanks Ethan.
September 26, 2023
More than anything, this book reminded me of "And the Band Played On." Not that work is non-fiction and it goes form like 1970-something to the 90s, covering every step along the way toward HIV/AIDS' emergence in the US. "How Long Has this Been Going On" is a work of fiction, and only the latter 1/3 of the book deals with AIDS. They are similar in their attempt to take a cast of hundreds and interlock their stories over many decades to make clear the arc of history.
"...Been Going on" achieves the drama and splendor required for an epic tale. It was unclear to me what more it said then: Post War queerness went from being outlaw, dangerous and hard to better, at least in terms of achieving community by the 70s, then got fucked over big time by AIDS. There's nothing wrong with saying this, but they are not new ideas or facts. The novel felt like mostly a vehicle to share a lot of historical plot points. Thematically though, the book is very sweet--and very Tales of the City--in preaching the gospel of homosuperiority. My biggest take away actually was that my inveterate disinterest in most straight life and my inveterate distrust of most straight people I meet is not an isolated incident.
My primary complaint is that I hate seeing my community depicted as being primarily white and think. Though frankly even if it hadn't been portrayed that way, the reality is that queer culture--just like all of America centers whiteness. There were attempts to share some BIPOC POVS, but they were clumsy (though sustained, and sincere).
Despite its weaknesses (including that it's 600 pages, and a heavy 600 pages at that) I was compelled to read it long past times I should have been asleep, because, as always I am astounded by the passion and committement of post WWII society--obviously driven by straight men, or as this book posits, deeply closeted gay men--to killing any deviation from a strict gender binary and definitions of the sexes in a completely white context, treating all Black sexuality as deviant. And it's not just something historical, it's still happening now.
PS- I have read many of Ethan Morden's Broadway nonfiction, and he was always one of my favorite guests on Theater Talk. I thought of him as a lovable theater eunuch. Not so anymore! The racy sex scenes--and his hot leather daddy author photo from 1995--let me see the sharper, sexier, queerer teeth in his Broadway bite.
"...Been Going on" achieves the drama and splendor required for an epic tale. It was unclear to me what more it said then: Post War queerness went from being outlaw, dangerous and hard to better, at least in terms of achieving community by the 70s, then got fucked over big time by AIDS. There's nothing wrong with saying this, but they are not new ideas or facts. The novel felt like mostly a vehicle to share a lot of historical plot points. Thematically though, the book is very sweet--and very Tales of the City--in preaching the gospel of homosuperiority. My biggest take away actually was that my inveterate disinterest in most straight life and my inveterate distrust of most straight people I meet is not an isolated incident.
My primary complaint is that I hate seeing my community depicted as being primarily white and think. Though frankly even if it hadn't been portrayed that way, the reality is that queer culture--just like all of America centers whiteness. There were attempts to share some BIPOC POVS, but they were clumsy (though sustained, and sincere).
Despite its weaknesses (including that it's 600 pages, and a heavy 600 pages at that) I was compelled to read it long past times I should have been asleep, because, as always I am astounded by the passion and committement of post WWII society--obviously driven by straight men, or as this book posits, deeply closeted gay men--to killing any deviation from a strict gender binary and definitions of the sexes in a completely white context, treating all Black sexuality as deviant. And it's not just something historical, it's still happening now.
PS- I have read many of Ethan Morden's Broadway nonfiction, and he was always one of my favorite guests on Theater Talk. I thought of him as a lovable theater eunuch. Not so anymore! The racy sex scenes--and his hot leather daddy author photo from 1995--let me see the sharper, sexier, queerer teeth in his Broadway bite.
August 6, 2019
RATING: ★★★½
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Sometimes, I struggle with how I'm supposed to judge things. Am I supposed to judge them based how I perceive them now, in 2019, or take into account that they're old and the world as a whole has changed since then?
This book is definitely such a case and I'm struggling quite bad. In this instance, I feel like what I'm struggling with is justified simply because it's so far from okay nowadays, it's offensive at best and triggering at worst.
In this novel, you're following the development and the liberation of the gay community in the US, spanning between 1949 and 1991. You're jumping between different groups of people, that are connected to each other in some ways but still semi separate. This book is divived into parts. 1949-1955. 1963-1969. 1975. So on, so forth. You're also moving between different locations; Los Angeles, small town Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, San Francisco.
While you are following the same bunch of people throughout the years, this book takes the birds eye perspective on the events in this book, and the characters. This means you never really get close to any of the characters, they're simply pieces of a larger story that this author wants to tell. That's perfectly okay, the authors gets his points across well and I fully understand his reasoning for doing it this way. There were one two characters I ended up actually liking, Lois and Elaine, a lesbian couple. The rest of the characters I either felt indifferent about or outright disliked.
The author sometimes inserts himself in the story, and I know that's a pretty common stylistic tool, it's unfortunately not one I am the biggest fan of.
I think nowadays when you talk about the LGBT community in the historic sense, you sort of get the idea that one day in the late 1970s, the gay world just popped out of nowhere. At least I feel like it sometimes sound like that, when you hear people talk about it. Books like this one, while it has aged and sometimes not in a good way, are incredibly important to combat those notions.
I am rating this book 3.5 stars because I liked the idea of this story more than I liked the actual story. I have some straight up problems with this one, which I'll get into in a minute but before I get there I'll just problematize another aspect of this book. While this book is sort of marketed as a 'gay history' I'd say, sure it is. But it tells the story of white, cis gender homosexual males, most of whom are quite well off. I know, especially back in the days, gay men were horribly treated, abused and oppressed, I'm definitely not diminishing that fact. However, what this book never did was to show how different your experiences in the LGBT community would have been, had you been, say, a black lesbian back in 1949. Again, this criticism is definitely not meant to take away from the importance of a story like this - I'm just saying I wish at some point more voices will be heard on this topic. That being said, I appreciate the lesbian characters in this (even though I don't always agree with how they're written) and also Jezebel. Gotta love Jezebel.
Now, onto the things that I couldn't look past:
1. There's a couple, Luke and Tom. Luke has feelings for Tom, Tom is black out drunk. Tom passes out, Luke forces himself onto him, Tom wakes up and is clearly bothered by that afterwards. That. is. rape. Straight up rape. The way it was handled afterwards in the book certainly didn't treat it as rape; moreover, people were rather "oh he liked him so much, he couldn't stop himself uwu of course Tom has a hard time coming to terms with not being straight!!" Uuuh, maybe it's just me but maaaaybe Tom has a hard time coming to terms with what happened because Tom was raped and therefor traumatized? Just a thought. Also, Tom and Luke eventually end up together which doesn't sit right with me either.
2. Someone's voice being described as "black". That does not fly.
3. Enter a lesbian couple; Evan and Alice. Evan is a stone butch, and her ways are passed off as ~sexy. She's controlling, emotionally AND physically abusive towards Alice. Again, this is passed off as semi romantic or just "lesbians being dramatic", and not as the kind of domestic abuse that it is. Not once is this kind of behavior problematized. At all.
4. Bisexuals are throughout this story seen as...basically every single stereotype regarding bisexuals that still affect us to this day. They're seen as freeloaders, like they can't make their minds up...let's just say, if you want to read this book be prepared for this overt biphobia.
5. The sexism in this book is pretty ripe. Here, the author shows in certain passages how he's aware of women's situation but in others this book contains very heavy criticism of feminism/lesbians. Looking at this in 2019, this rubs me the wrong way.
I'm struggling with how to consider these problems, really. I'm not sure whether it's me looking through my 2019 glasses and calling out things but that no one would consider problematic way back then or if this author wrote some of these things to highlight certain problems within the community (at times, I'm certain its the latter but I don't always feel this way). I mean, I'm not sure whether this book is, for example, biphobic because there was biphobia back then that wasn't challenged or if it's the author trying to show how problematic the community was.
To summarize, I think I enjoyed the idea of this book more than I liked the actual story. That being said, while I think some things about this book haven't aged well, this is still an important read because we must never forget our history.
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"You know, Frank, I think the Kid does that so well because all gay people learn to be actors almost from birth. Because we have to pretend to be like everyone else even while we know that we’re different. We ape them, you know? Perform a version of them and everything.”
Sometimes, I struggle with how I'm supposed to judge things. Am I supposed to judge them based how I perceive them now, in 2019, or take into account that they're old and the world as a whole has changed since then?
This book is definitely such a case and I'm struggling quite bad. In this instance, I feel like what I'm struggling with is justified simply because it's so far from okay nowadays, it's offensive at best and triggering at worst.
In this novel, you're following the development and the liberation of the gay community in the US, spanning between 1949 and 1991. You're jumping between different groups of people, that are connected to each other in some ways but still semi separate. This book is divived into parts. 1949-1955. 1963-1969. 1975. So on, so forth. You're also moving between different locations; Los Angeles, small town Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, San Francisco.
While you are following the same bunch of people throughout the years, this book takes the birds eye perspective on the events in this book, and the characters. This means you never really get close to any of the characters, they're simply pieces of a larger story that this author wants to tell. That's perfectly okay, the authors gets his points across well and I fully understand his reasoning for doing it this way. There were one two characters I ended up actually liking, Lois and Elaine, a lesbian couple. The rest of the characters I either felt indifferent about or outright disliked.
The author sometimes inserts himself in the story, and I know that's a pretty common stylistic tool, it's unfortunately not one I am the biggest fan of.
I think nowadays when you talk about the LGBT community in the historic sense, you sort of get the idea that one day in the late 1970s, the gay world just popped out of nowhere. At least I feel like it sometimes sound like that, when you hear people talk about it. Books like this one, while it has aged and sometimes not in a good way, are incredibly important to combat those notions.
I am rating this book 3.5 stars because I liked the idea of this story more than I liked the actual story. I have some straight up problems with this one, which I'll get into in a minute but before I get there I'll just problematize another aspect of this book. While this book is sort of marketed as a 'gay history' I'd say, sure it is. But it tells the story of white, cis gender homosexual males, most of whom are quite well off. I know, especially back in the days, gay men were horribly treated, abused and oppressed, I'm definitely not diminishing that fact. However, what this book never did was to show how different your experiences in the LGBT community would have been, had you been, say, a black lesbian back in 1949. Again, this criticism is definitely not meant to take away from the importance of a story like this - I'm just saying I wish at some point more voices will be heard on this topic. That being said, I appreciate the lesbian characters in this (even though I don't always agree with how they're written) and also Jezebel. Gotta love Jezebel.
Now, onto the things that I couldn't look past:
1. There's a couple, Luke and Tom. Luke has feelings for Tom, Tom is black out drunk. Tom passes out, Luke forces himself onto him, Tom wakes up and is clearly bothered by that afterwards. That. is. rape. Straight up rape. The way it was handled afterwards in the book certainly didn't treat it as rape; moreover, people were rather "oh he liked him so much, he couldn't stop himself uwu of course Tom has a hard time coming to terms with not being straight!!" Uuuh, maybe it's just me but maaaaybe Tom has a hard time coming to terms with what happened because Tom was raped and therefor traumatized? Just a thought. Also, Tom and Luke eventually end up together which doesn't sit right with me either.
2. Someone's voice being described as "black". That does not fly.
3. Enter a lesbian couple; Evan and Alice. Evan is a stone butch, and her ways are passed off as ~sexy. She's controlling, emotionally AND physically abusive towards Alice. Again, this is passed off as semi romantic or just "lesbians being dramatic", and not as the kind of domestic abuse that it is. Not once is this kind of behavior problematized. At all.
4. Bisexuals are throughout this story seen as...basically every single stereotype regarding bisexuals that still affect us to this day. They're seen as freeloaders, like they can't make their minds up...let's just say, if you want to read this book be prepared for this overt biphobia.
5. The sexism in this book is pretty ripe. Here, the author shows in certain passages how he's aware of women's situation but in others this book contains very heavy criticism of feminism/lesbians. Looking at this in 2019, this rubs me the wrong way.
I'm struggling with how to consider these problems, really. I'm not sure whether it's me looking through my 2019 glasses and calling out things but that no one would consider problematic way back then or if this author wrote some of these things to highlight certain problems within the community (at times, I'm certain its the latter but I don't always feel this way). I mean, I'm not sure whether this book is, for example, biphobic because there was biphobia back then that wasn't challenged or if it's the author trying to show how problematic the community was.
To summarize, I think I enjoyed the idea of this book more than I liked the actual story. That being said, while I think some things about this book haven't aged well, this is still an important read because we must never forget our history.
August 14, 2025
So wild and messy and all over the place but ultimately, every single one of those stories carries the right heart and spirit that is genuine, even the ones that I didn't cared for or the ones that plainly bored me. I liked the episodic, in-your-face and blunt ways Ethan Mordden presented the dialogues and stories in this book and I'm excited to read more of his work. Oh and also, I really liked the story between Tom and Luke, the 'can't get over your first love from that one complex secret not-relationship you had in your teens with a repressed denial boy which spans for years before you both reunite in your adult years' is an age old trope in gay literature, but something about the way Ethan Mordden wrote their story here feels more at stake and more of that good old tension that is actually accompanied by two characters that are so intriguing to read about individually. It's like he's very making the better version of the story of gore vidal's the city and the pillars (mentioned and referenced in the book) which had a happy(sorta) ending.
March 13, 2023
This sweeping novel, which captures the high and low points of gay culture in US from the 1950’s to the 1990’s, was a noble idea, but far from perfect in execution. The novel starts off strongly in 1950’s Los Angeles with a group of closeted gay and lesbian characters that frequent an underground club. Meanwhile, an undercover LA cop who cruises the parks to arrest gay men slowly realizes he’s one of them. This part of the novel was engaging and believable, but as the book moved into the 70’s and 80’s it became a jumble of characters and stories used to highlight milestones like Stonewall, the rise of gay porn, and the AIDS crisis. The dialogue became more contrived as did the situations the author put his characters in to get them to the right places at the right times. I found myself skimming the last 200 pages just to get through it.
November 12, 2023
An epic book covering the development of gay society from the 1940s to 1991. Well crafted an interesting and no doubt an important piece of fiction reflecting real life. Found it a bit hard going at times, which I suppose is to be expected, think some of the characters could have been developed more as I lost track of who was who a few times. Left me feeling a bit depressed but I’m sure it was intended as a both/and. It seems though 30 years after this book was written gay hate is still prevalent and is in fact resurgent
February 1, 2020
Wonderful epic story!
I love this book, mostly because it presents gay history in narrative form. The characters are wonderful, and Mordden captures the fear, the joy, the party, and the loss that our community has felt over the years. I know these characters. These characters are me.
I love this book, mostly because it presents gay history in narrative form. The characters are wonderful, and Mordden captures the fear, the joy, the party, and the loss that our community has felt over the years. I know these characters. These characters are me.
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