The Clothesline Swing is the story of two gay Syrians, lovers and refugees, who flee their war-ravaged country for a new life in Canada. Set in the future, some forty years after they first arrive in Vancouver, the story focuses on the now old couple’s final months together. The narrator’s partner is dying. His only relief comes from the stories that his lover, whom he calls Hakawati (“storyteller” in Arabic), tells him. “I’m your Scheherazade,” Hakawati tells his sleepless partner. “I offer you souvenirs: my stories, the pieces of my soul, to help you sleep.”

Jake Shears (real name, Jason Sellards) was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1978, and was shuttled back and forth between there and Seattle during his school years. A showy, bossy gay kid who watched, unimpressed, as baseballs “plunked on the ground yards away from me, like a dead shooting star,” he found himself instead obsessed with David Bowie …