The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

Sometimes the greatest dramas are played on a very small stage. Sometimes the greatest triumph in a life is simply recognizing what you have and how precious it is.

Santino Hassell’s gritty romance of two longtime blue-collar friends is a revelation within the m/m genre. This is not the New York of gym bunnies and closeted lawyers, although that world hovers shimmering in the background. This is love on the mean streets of Queens. Michael Rodriguez is Puerto Rican and Nunzio Medici is Italian. They’ve been gay best friends since middle school, and both have climbed out of the dead-end world of their families far enough to become successful high school teachers in a Brooklyn magnet school. They both love what they do and are proud of what they’ve achieved. But that hasn’t changed who they are.

A booze-fueled threesome with a WASPy blond boy is the startling (and extremely hot) opening scene for this novel. It is the reader’s primary clue as to what will happen in the rest of the book, and the key trigger for both Mike and Nunzio that will unleash everything that they do subsequently.

Hassell creates a world of secondary characters with as much detail as he needs to provide strong narrative counterpoints to Mike and Nunzio. Foremost is Mike’s younger brother, Raymond, who seems to desperately need his brother even as the two young men push each other away. David Butler, the aforementioned blond, provides yet another foil, and becomes a kind of emotional sounding board for both Mike and Nunzio. Although he is ridiculed as exactly the sort of privileged white boy who is the antithesis of life on Sutphin Boulevard, it is pretty clear from the start that David is more solid, more important than any stereotype.

The lesser players in this drama – largely Mike’s family, but including students and other folks who he encounters as he makes his journey, physical and psychological, across Queens – are not much more than vivid sketches; but they do their jobs. Ultimately, this is Mike Rodriguez’s story, his voyage to hell and back. Unwilling to accept what’s in front of his face, untrained by the circumstances of his life to handle the hard facts of his life, he has to take the hard way home.

This is not an easy book to read; and neither Mike nor Nunzio are easy men to like. And yet we do like them, a lot. Hassell has managed to give them profound humanity, so that right away, even when they’re soaked with alcohol, we can see the goodness of their hearts, the essential gentleness of their natures. This is what keeps us rooting for them even as we wince at the ugliness in which they get caught.

There are people who complain, quite rightly, that the m/m genre is too sweet and too romantic, mired in its Barbara Cartland tropes and its audience’s expectations. Santino Hassell offers readers an alternative universe. It might be a rougher experience than we’re used to, but it presents insights into human nature that, in the end, are their own reward.