At 17 Thomas-Edward escapes southern New Jersey and the tyranny of his parents love thinking he is ready for his life to begin, thinking he is ready for anything. Anything quickly arrives in the form of one Donovan Dion “Dondi” Whyte, his freshman roommate at the University of Pennsylvania. Dondi, who is like no one he has ever met before, in his own words: “Dondi became my guide, my Virgil, on my personal odyssey of self-discovery. I remember our freshman year so clearly. I wore Chanel For Men and he wore an ankle-length black wool cape with a hood. He swept around campus like Batman. I, Robin more often than not, trailed in his glamorous wake. Over Christmas break I sent him a card that stated a simple truth: ‘This Robin misses his Batman’.”
Dondi introduces Thomas him into “a looking-glass world in which everything was familiar yet larger, more exquisite, more precious than anything he had ever known.” Dondi is stunningly wealthy, sophisticated, passionate, urbane—everything Thomas has dreamed of loving. They fall in love but the relationship fails. They remain uneasy friends. Their fragile relationship is threatened when Thomas falls in love with Matthew, Dondi’s younger brother.
Deeply emotional, “What Binds Us” is the story of three young men who discover a love that both unites and separates them. Theirs is a world of privilege and love, a world of their own making that begins to unravel despite their shared love and best efforts. The character-driven story is set in Philadelphia and Long Island. Spanning a decade from the late 70s to the late 80s: “The reign of the Queen was over; the Snap Divas had folded their hands and gone quietly to the gym, replacing gestures with muscle… The nation for which Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” had been a dance anthem, was now, a dying nation. It was the age of AIDS.”
The three come of age as the AIDS crisis emerges. This book chronicles their journey into a world changed by a disease that was suddenly apparent and little understood. Yet despite tragedy and loss, this remains a story of a great love, a story that teaches sometimes in an ending we find our beginning; it is also a story about family and friendship and commitment and death.
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One year for Christmas my parents gave me a Kindle. I was at first perplexed. It’s true, I’m a reader—a big reader—but I read books, paper-based, tree-killing, old-fashioned turn the pages books. Hell we have more than 2,000 books—and those are just the ones I couldn’t bear to part with. Still I was intrigued: I could “thumb” through hundreds of books, even buy books without leaving my house. Kindle and Amazon quickly opened up a whole new, much larger, world of reading. Heck I could look for a book at 3 a.m. and be reading it 30 seconds later.
So it seemed fitting that less than a year later Carina Press offered to ePublish my debut novel, “What Binds Us.” I was, after all, a convert, a fan of the digital book. I admit that I had always dreamed of publishing traditionally, of being able to hold that first book in my hand, of being able to walk into a book store and see my book on a shelf, but times had changed and really the goal of any writer is, I think, to be read—as widely as possible. And let’s face the digital book space was, is, growing exponentially. (66.6 million e-Books were sold in January 2011; 99.5 million were sold in January 2012.)
Any qualms I had were quickly forgotten and we dove into the publication process. Not surprisingly, I’ve never met anyone at Carina Press in person. My editor is based in Cleveland and we worked through edits, cover design, launch plans virtually. Edits were handled through track changes in Word. I admit that surprised me. “Galleys” were Word documents or PDFs. I’ll never forget the first time I entered “What Binds Us” in the search box on Amazon and my book came up. In fact, now, three months later that is still the first thing I do every morning. And it is still a thrill.
ePublishing, I think, opens a wider gateway to readers. I’ve read there’s a school of thought that maintains the relative anonymity of accessing eBooks has broadened the market so that someone who would be reluctant to go into a bookstore and purchase a book with a racy cover, or buy a GLBT Romance, can now do so easily through the discretion and anonymity of online shopping.
In addition to the U.S., my book has been read in the UK, Canada, Brazil, the Netherlands, Venezuela, India and Romania. I’m not so sure I would have gained a global reach so easily had the book not been available in eBook format. So yes, I’m a believer and a supporter of ePublishing. In fact, my sophomore effort, “Damaged Angels” will be ePublished in September 2012.
Larry Benjamin
www.larrybenjamin.com
Excerpt
Prologue
When I was a child the advent of fall would fill me with hope. Each year I emerged from the heat and ennui of the long, empty summer like a phoenix, not only reborn but reinvented. One year, I came away from the summer with pubic hair. The next with a new chest and biceps. And still another year with a love of the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Now the seasons seem out of sequence so that it’s fall again, after a long, dark winter. A winter without hope. A season without rebirth. There is only death now. Everywhere I see lifeless eyes staring out of gaunt purple faces and men like carelessly drawn stick figures. The air smells like the ashes of attar.
It is a season of black days and blacker nights. An emotional free fall. A tumbling through air. If not for Matthew, I would feel anchored to nothing. Nothing but these empty white pages before me, which I feel compelled to fill with the black indelible ink of memory. Memories of a love lost and a love found. Memories of a life shared and a life lost.
Remembering is dangerous; each memory clear, sharp as a shard of glass, cutting through the healing distance of time, rendering the loss new again.
I must write it all down—quickly, before it leaves me. Like he did. Gone too soon.
Matthew leans over my shoulder, reading. I am grateful for his presence, for the smell of him, for the sounds his life makes as it bumps up against mine.
Chapter One
One Easter Sunday, when I was four, my parents dressed me in a miniature version of one of my father’s suits (my mother sews). The suit was an exact replica right down to the bow tie, which I hated. They either chose to ignore or did not understand my inarticulate shrieks of protest, for they affixed the hated bow tie to my squirming neck. When they went upstairs to finish dressing themselves, I loosed the dreadful thing and flung it into the backyard. When they returned downstairs, they found me quiet and tie-less. Unable to extract the whereabouts of the tie from me, already late for church, they flung me into the back of Daddy’s finned Cadillac and off to church we went.
When I was in the first grade our teacher, Miss Franzioni, whose hair was Dippity-Dooed in place over one eye, turning her into a kind of benevolent Cyclops, created a game in which each day, a boy and girl were selected to act out a fairy-tale romance between a prince and a princess. The boy and girl were required to hold hands and dance around the room while the whole class watched and sang. At the end of the song the prince and princess kissed and returned to their seats. When my turn came to act out the bit of hetero-child nonsense, I coolly refused. Miss Franzioni insisted. I cried. Miss Franzioni cajoled. I screamed, “I won’t kiss her. You can’t make me!”
To calm my escalating hysteria, she said I did not have to kiss the princess, a tall, lanky girl named Valerie, who was otherwise my friend. I did not have to kiss her, but I had to dance with her. And I had to hold her hand.
Afterwards I washed my hands until my palms turned pink and my fingertips puckered and wrinkled; if I’d had a knife, I would have cut off my hands at the wrist.
When I was twelve my parents—trying to make a man out of me—enrolled me in the boy scouts; I retaliated by falling in love with my scoutmaster’s son, who ignored me. Out of frustration, I flung myself overboard during a canoe trip on our lake. He dove into the water after me and dragged me to shore. When he bent down to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to what he must surely have thought was my lifeless body, I opened my mouth and thrust my tongue into his mouth. Startled, he kissed me back.
My boy scouts career came to an abrupt, if not inglorious, end.
At seventeen I escaped the tyranny of my parents’ love and entered into undergraduate service at the University of Pennsylvania. We—my parents and I—were each relieved to be free of the company of the other.
As I’d grown up in New Jersey in the kind of quiet planned community, where the elder sons mowed the lawns on Saturday morning while their parents made discreet love behind the locked doors of their upstairs bedroom, I was startled to find myself alone, a stranger in a strange land without map or tour guide.
It was the fall of 1977, the beginning of everything. I was seventeen. I was at last free. And although I had no need greater than to shake off the shackles of this very freedom, I was happy. And ready for anything.
Anything arrived shortly, in the rather startling personage of one Donovan Dion Whyte.
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