The time is the post-COVID present (with some reflections back). The place is Boston (and its environs, plus a few back-story settings). And the main characters are mostly fifty-, sixty- seventy-somethings — “the first generation of out gay men.”
The books is “Zigzag,” 16 loosely interlinking stories by the Boston–based writer Philip Gambone that chronicle a diverse range of characters very familiar to any LGBT person living in our region over the past few decades.
The setting, too, is rich with local color, down to the winter-slick brick sidewalks of the South End, the scent of witch hazel permeating streets there in early spring, or the steamy camaraderie of a gay sports bar on game day. Characters frequent many local haunts familiar to Bostonian readers, some fictional, some factual, all evocating a deep, true sense of place both contemporary and back through the years. (Without sentimentality, the read can be a nostalgic trip, even while clear-eyed and solidly rooted in the present.)
In clean, concise and compassionate prose, Gambone pulls his readers into his characters’ lives as they embark on “marriages and break-ups, rekindle old loves and initiate romance, explore sex in an online era, and experience the loss of loved ones and familiar gay culture,” as his publisher neatly describes it.
He transports his readers to (again from the publisher, lest I miss anything): “a radical faerie wedding, a closeted French teacher’s classroom, the weekly café gathering of a group of older gay bohemians (one who’s adopted a child), a randy eighty-year-old portrait painter who insists his buttoned-up client pose in the nude, a gay man who discovers his brother is HIV positive, a man in a wheelchair who hires a straight (23-year-old) companion, another who hooks up with a married man, and a long-standing gay couple whose weekly visits to a sports café in Boston’s Italian neighborhood present a delicious and dangerous temptation.”
Explains Gambone, “I wanted to chronicle this very special generation of gay men. We’ve lived a long life. We were in the closet, we came out. We struggled, we had love affairs, we had careers. And now we’re reaching yet another plateau in our lives.” All as they bring their life experiences — their hopes, dreams and lessons learned — into the challenges of a contemporary and sometimes confusing future.
As for Gambone’s own story, the Wakefield, Mass.–native earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard College and a master’s from the Episcopal Divinity School. For a brief time after school, he lived in Kansas City before returning to Boston, where he’s lived now for 50-some years.
“I love this city. I love its diversity. I love its cultural richness. I love the architecture. I love the gay life. One thing I’m doing in the book, without being sentimental about it, is certainly celebrating Boston,” he says.
Gambone has penned about 60 reviews for the Boston-based Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide along with numerous scholarly articles for The Boston Globe and New York Times. He is the author of two previous works of fiction, including the Lambda Literary Award-nominated story collection “The Language We Use Up here” and “Beijing: A Novel,” plus three books of nonfiction. He is also the editor of “Breaking the Rules: The Intimate Diary of Ross Terrill,” covered in the March/April 2024 issue of Boston Spirit.
For 27 years, he was a faculty member at The Park School in Brookline, Massachusetts, and has taught English at Boston University Academy and writing at Boston College, Harvard Extension School and the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
In writing “Zigzag,” Gambone says, he wanted to chronicle this very special generation of gay man. Many of the stories celebrate personal victories, even the tales that cast a cool eye on personal foibles that block the characters from reaching potentials to (at least right away) become their better selves. Yet even then, as the author notes, “the principal characters come to an insight about themselves, come to have more peace with their lives. I don’t even think it’s pretentious to say they have a spiritual awakening, certainly in some of the stories.”.
“That’s another thing that I want people to get out of the book,” he says. “The sense that life isn’t over, that you’re never too old to learn something new about yourself, to grow and to remain alive to life.”
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