Closet Case-Quality Guarantee

Description

Title: Closet Case

Author: Robert Rodi

ISBN: 9780452272118

Publisher: Plume

Published: 1994

Binding: Paperback

Language: English

Edition: Reprint

Condition Note: Excellent, unmarked copy with little wear and tight binding. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.

Publisher : No one has ever written a funnier “coming out” novel than Robert Rodi. Here the bedeviling and bedeviled author of Fag Hag mixes bedroom and boardroom farce in the deliciously mordant story of Lionel Frank – a Chicago ad man who desperately hides his homosexuality from his co-workers and clients, like All-Pro Power Tools. Lionel is a hilariously unlikely hero. Devoting his days to working among homophobic he-men and his nights to dialing 1-900-BOY-TOYZ, he’s achieved a fragile closet equilibrium – until Donna, the office lesbian, catches him ogling a male stripper at a notorious gay dance club. From then on, it’s open season on Lionel’s reputation. And each time he tries to quell dangerous speculation by presenting himself as happily hetero, he manages to stumble ever more outrageously into the throes of gay lust – culminating in an extended crush on a wild-eyed Transylvanian anarchist. Things come to a head when Lionel is invited to a week-long couples-only getaway at a Wisconsin cabin with his bosses and their wives. His neighbor, the Latina bombshell Yolanda Reynoso, agrees to go along as his cover, largely to get away from her spear-carrying men’s-movement boyfriend. But as twilight falls in the northern forest and the call of the loon carries across the lake, Lionel finds himself careening toward both destiny and disaster – and learns the hard way that coming out may literally be a matter of life and death. In Closet Case, Rodi deftly reveals the authentic pain of being afraid to be gay in a homophobic world, yet he looks back with laughter, not anger. Readers who are themselves in the closet will find Lionel’s journey a cathartic experience; Rodi shows that at the journey’s endlie serenity, self-acceptance, and maybe even true love. Closet Case is that rarest of novels: one both riotously funny and wonderfully humane.