The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

John wrote: "Thanks, Ulysses!!! (I hope you got my off-group note when this review was posted.)

Just a quick update. I published "A Fool Among Fools" in paperback in September 2019, and it's available now on A..."

Adventures in Advertising ... This book was something of a nostalgic trip back to my own late 20s. The author and I were acquaintances within a large circle of gay men centered in Hoboken, New Jersey in the 1980s. I hadn't heard of him in probably twenty years, and when this book popped up, I had to read it.

Terracuso is a good writer - quick, amusing, literate (oh, dear lord, how nice to read someone who knows actual grammar rules and uses them!). His darkly comic memoir of life in a large (fictitious) advertising agency is really the story about a 29-year-old gay man facing the uncertainties and all-too-real fears of life in that dark decade, when Reagan was president and AIDS was killing us off as we were just beginning to mature.

Terracuso wonderfully captures both the sense of place and the emotional context of the time, reflecting gay New York in the years when Greenwich Village was the gay place to hang out and Chelsea was simply another neighborhood without much cachet.

The character of Michael Gregoretti is not entirely lovable - nor is he intended to be. Don't get me wrong - he's a nice guy, an attractive guy, with good ideas and a big heart. But he's embittered by the double whammy of a frustrating job in a homophobic corporation and life in the shadow of a plague. In fact, Michael is a bit of a whiner, and while his complaints are justified nicely by his razor sharp depiction of ad agency behavior, Terracuso writes him with enough spleen that he begins to get tiresome - just like lots of those friends we all had back then. What ultimately saves Michael from being unlikable is both the friends he has in the book - his marvelous roommate Anthony and his romance-writer chum Irene - and his parents. Rose and Joe Gregoretti live on Long Island, and Michael visits them periodically during the year in which the book takes place. We learn a great deal about this couple, and indeed a good bit of the family, during the crucial moments when they are on stage with their son. The love these two very real people show their son proves that he must be a great guy and worthy of our love as well.

"A Fool Among Fools" is sort of a "Mad Men" from a gay angle during the darkest time in gay history in America. I stopped watching "Mad Men" two seasons ago because I couldn't see myself in it any more...but, although I never worked in advertising, my heart was right in the middle of Michael Gregoretti's life. We've all known what it is to be a fool among fools.

Thanks, Ulysses!!! (I hope you got my off-group note when this review was posted.)

Just a quick update. I published "A Fool Among Fools" in paperback in September 2019, and it's available now on Amazon.com.

This is good to hear, John. Boy, I published that review before I started archiving (i.e. saving) them...so I'm glad to have it in my files, to remind me of the books I've read. --U

I've popped that review into Amazon for the print version.

Thanks!!!