Gutterboys

A twisted gay tale of unrequited love in Lower Manhattan in the early 1980s filled with scenes of humorous debauchery. Jeremy, a shy 19-year-old, falls madly in love with Colin, a disturbed yet well-read older hustler. Though Colin rejects Jeremy as a lover, he takes him on as a protege, introducing him to the hilariously depraved world of new wave nightclubs and gay bars in the days before AIDS and the war on drugs. Innocent Jeremy, protected by the guardian spirits of his beloved dead grandmothers - one a fiery Jewish socialist, the other a proper British matron - becomes increasingly unstable under the strain of his unanswered devotion. When Jeremy finally snaps, he reaches an understanding with Colin that he never anticipated.

Alvin Orloff began writing in 1977 as a teenage lyricist for The Blowdryers, an early San Francisco punk band. He spent all of the 1980s and much of the 1990s dabbling in performance art, underground theater, night clubs, political activism, and cabaret, and zine writing before remembering that all he’d ever wanted to be was a novelist. His first work, I Married an Earthling, came out in 2000 and his second, Gutter Boys, in 2004. His latest novel, Why Aren’t You Smiling? releases in fall 2011. His day job is managing Dog Eared Books, a literary hot-spot in the heart of San Francisco’s uber-trendy Mission District.