ALEX UNDERGROUND
It's 1970, the era of transgressive sex, psychedelic drugs and violent revolution. Alex gives an impassioned speech that incites a deadly campus riot; he and Doug take off on the run. Chicago, Paris, London, Havana. Highways and hideouts, cocktail bars and cruising spots, all-night drives, secret meetings and a bank heist that goes spectacularly wrong. Meanwhile Alex comes to see that his friend can never give him what he really wants. So he uses this clandestine interlude to uncover his own hidden truth.
Pretended identities, twisted secrets – but coming out gay and whole on the other side. “That awful year,” Alex will reflect much later, “when a benign impulse to remake the world led me to do so many strange and regrettable things.” This is a gripping story of the knotted psychology beneath political action, and one man’s struggle to find his honest self.
Alex Underground is self-published and available from Amazon. CLICK HERE.
That Whole Thing the Dead Come Out Of
Alex Underground is based partly on my own experience as a radical on the run. One scene, in particular—an encounter with a man I might have taken seriously, learned from, or even spent my life with—was lifted straight from memory.
Forty years later, I tried to find him. I describe that search in this essay published on Lambda Literary.