[.ca] Men Who Love Men (ISBN 0758213751)

a great read:
I wasn't sure about this book but a friend told me to give it a read and I'm so glad I did. What a refreshing look at the art of dating and finding love. I'll look at my own relationships with a fresh eye now. I've not read any of Mr. Mann's previous books but this one certainly was able to stand on its own. The characterizations are wonderful and the ideas presented are palatable even though I didn't think they would be. Thank you Mr. Mann. I can't wait to hunt out your other books.

"But if he could a man ho he loved and loved him back":
Henry Weiner has all but lost hope that he will ever find the long sort after Mr. Right. In Henry's world, true love, the way Henry romanticizes it, whether it exists or not, is maybe two people finding each other and making the best of it. Now in his early thirties and permanently ensconced in Provincetown, and helping his best friends novelist Jeff O'Brien and hotelier Lloyd Griffith manage their guesthouse Nirvana, Henry suffers from a sort of mid-life malaise. Intent to eat buckets of ice cream while watching late night reruns of tacky seventies television shows, his life seems to be put on hold as he waits for that special man to come along. One afternoon at a tea dance, into his world marches Luke, a young twenty-something wraith-like hunk and cunning would-be novelist who has abs of steel and a body to die for. Once one of the beautiful boys, one of the A-list, even though those days seem like a hazy dream to him now, Henry can't believe his luck, that a hot young stud such as Luke would be interested in him with his crows feet, receding hairline and love handles. Luke attends to Henry with far more than sympathetic eye, calling him a "stud muffin" and curiously intrigued by the fact that Henry works for Jeff O'Brien. After a night of hot and sweaty sex, Luke eventually reveals his true nature to Henry. Luke is in fact a fan of Jeff's and Henry becomes convinced he is scheming to get an invitation for meet Jeff, the whole affair nothing more than transparent ploy to curry his favor and perhaps even hop into Jeff's bed. The surprise revelation is when Henry suddenly realizes that Luke is probably just like all the other boys that have paraded throughout his life, right back to Lloyd who once looked Henry in the eye and told him he could never love anyone the way he loves Jeff. Will I never have a boyfriend?" Henry whines to all and sundry, the thought constantly circulating in his mind and terrifying him that he may be one of the people destined never to find a lover. As time keeps ticking, and he's still alone, Henry always comes back to grieving his former lovers, Joey and Daniel, and even Lloyd, always comparing them to the mythical figure of "Jack," the idealistic and mythical love who comes into his arms late at night. Of course, Henry is not lacking in potential suitors, apart from the very hot Luke, there's Gale, a gym colleague who challenges Henry's attitudes on what he wants out of a lover, and the mature well-muscled, and handsome Evan who is definitely Henry's type but also holds a dark secret. There's also the forty-five impossibly old Martin, a carpenter with a "beefy frame and close-cropped beard" who, fresh from his life in Pennsylvania, confesses to Henry that he's having a sort of mid-life crisis. Convinced that he might miss out on finding true love at last, Henry resists the idea of Jeff and Lloyd's impending nuptials married, unnerved by the idea of their settled domesticity. Yet there's also a part of him that wants to be curled up on a couch eating brownies, getting fatter and becoming more and more forgotten by the boys on the dance floor, and where a man he loves can love him back, make him laugh and make him happy, and want to marry him, "I'd give anything for this, not to be alone anymore," he says. A distinctly unsympathetic character, Henry is as vapid and phony as many of the aging circuit party boys, who for some strange reason, figure that they can't cut it the scene anymore. Yet Henry of course, displays no qualms when it comes to chasing after hunky and muscular men, even when almost all of them for various nebulous reasons never seem to measure up to his high-minded and didactic ideals. The novel perpetuates this ridiculous notion that the party season ends for gay men sometime around the age of thirty, and that crows feet and a receding hairline are terrible forces that you to accept without further struggle, the inevitable entry into the "shoulder season" of gay life, where when "you get old, you get tired, you get fat, " ultimately signifies the end of being marketable. There's no doubt William J. Mann is a talented author, and I have long admired his work - both his fiction and his non-fiction, but Men Who Love Men reads as though it's been cobbled together at a moments notice, deliberately contrived to masquerade as a serious work of fiction, when it's really just a tacky gay beach read. To top it all off, the novel stinks of self-pity and self-aggrandizement, its titular hero portrayed mostly as a whining, precocious and facile mess, his constant waxing poetic over meeting the perfect man, eventually becoming almost too interminable to take. Mike Leonard July 07.