the LGBT community, as there were alternative viewpoints to those that Shilts advanced. When he advocated the closing of San Francisco’s bathhouses to contain the spread of AIDS, he was denounced as a hypocrite because he’d worked at a Portland bathhouse in 1974. In the early chapters, Lee offers an in-depth, graphic portrait of Shilts’ sex life. Shilts had written about his escapades for sex magazines. Lee believes this is critical to understanding who he was and why he chose the subjects on which he reported, quoting extensively from the journals he kept on his sexual adventures. He views this as valuable information about the ways he gained experience, how he felt about himself, and how he wished to find a fulfilling relationship even as he participated in the sex scene. Shilts was far from perfect in Lee’s assessment: “He was as complicated, vulnerable, and contradictory as many of us would be if we found ourselves in similar circumstances.” He participated in the gay institutions that he criticized—the bars, the bathhouses, gay street life—embodying the inconMICHAEL QUINN An Ohio State of Mind THE SPRING BEFORE OBERGEFELL: A Novel by Ben Grossberg University of Nebraska Press, 244 pages, $21.95 THE SPRING before Obergefell, poet Ben Grossberg’s debut novel, takes place in the months before the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage. This 2015 ruling will have a special resonance for the novel’s protagonist, Mike Breck, a lonely, middle-aged gay man living in small-town America. Mike, who’s pushing fifty, scrapes together a modest living through part-time work at Lowe’s, adjunct teaching at a community college (housed in a former mall), and handyman jobs. He shares his fixer-upper home near Columbus, Ohio, with his widowed father, an eighty-year-old “NRA Republican” still mourning his late wife, who died a few years earlier. To avoid arguing, father and son retreat to their respective rooms and devices—his father blaring Fox News, Mike scrolling the gay dating app Scruff. Mike knows that his life is very different from that of a gay man living in New York or San Francisco. Most of his ideas March–April 2025 43 gruities of the era in which he lived. While most of the issues that Shilts grappled with have been resolved—AIDS as a death sentence, LGBT people in the military, participation in mainstream politics—each controversy relates to a broader struggle for human rights that continues to be debated today. Lee contends that oppressive systems tend to recycle the same divisive issues as a way to justify their actions and extend their power. Shilts’ work helps us to better identify these tactics and how to address them. A month before he died, Shilts wrote a letter to The Advocate, his farewell to the gay community, concluding: “Hopefully, history will record that I was a hell of a nice guy and that the people who have criticized me are a bunch of fools and hypocrites.” As he lay dying, his biggest fear was that he’d be forgotten over time, so he would have been thrilled to know that his image was among the first to be installed on the San Francisco Rainbow Honor Walk near the corner of 19th and Castro Streets, his old stomping ground. about what it means to be gay these days come from what he sees online. With few prospects for a long-term relationship, he engages in no-strings-attached hookups. The men he invites over sometimes bump into his grumpy father at odd hours of the night, adding to the tension at home. When a mustachioed man accidentally bangs his shopping cart into Mike’s car in a parking lot, something in Mike is jolted awake. He is immediately attracted to “blue-collar sexy” Dave, but Dave’s reserved nature leaves Mike uncertain whether the attraction is mutual. He isn’t even sure if Dave is gay. As Mike draws Dave out of his shell, he comes to realize that he wants something from him other than just sex. Is Dave capable of more? Is Mike? The novel explores Mike’s attempts to expand his limiting beliefs of what life has in store for him. Mike’s process of self-discovery touches on the emotional scars of the AIDS epidemic that shaped his fundamental perspective on what’s possible in same-sex relationships. He describes himself, melodramatically, as “misshapen by a disease that people get vaccinated for nowadays. ... But it’s not my body that’s twisted. It’s my head, my heart.” Grossberg’s novel excels in portraying the banality of smalltown life and the fractured focus of the digital age. Mike scrolls, texts, and half-watches TV simultaneously, chasing connections with people whose chiseled body parts catch his eye, even as he ignores people in the same room—including his father. While he frequently behaves like an awkward adolescent, this is very much a novel about midlife, with the usual groans about an aging body’s aches and pains and poignant passages about lost time. Reflecting on his odd-job lifestyle, Mike observes:
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