A gay man counts the slings and arrows he has suffered in this autobiography.

The 85-year-old Burke looks back on successes and disappointments, the latter often stemming from homophobia. He recalls a boyhood in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, made hard by his father’s abandonment of the family and the author’s need to keep his same-sex attractions secret (while fending off the gropings of two men who guessed the truth). After a stint in Cleveland as a reporter, he moved to New York City and found the “brilliant” life he had dreamed of. He started a career in advertising that included work on the Frito Bandito campaign. Burke cruised the Hudson docks and began a 40-year relationship with editor and historian Jack Bernard, replete with opera and sojourns on Fire Island, where he once escaped a police raid on a gay trysting spot by running into the sea. The second half of the author’s alternatively rancorous and compassionate memoir focuses on his and Jack’s real estate investments, including two Manhattan apartment buildings. The sections on their savage legal battles with rent-controlled tenants are riveting. (One ploy they used was to deliberately commit and then fix many trivial housing code transgressions so as to meet the requirement of correcting 80% of their violations that would allow them to hike rents.) The narrative continues to the purchase of a château in France and, after Jack’s death, several houses in West Virginia with artist Frank Grant, whom Burke married. Sprinkled in are musings on sociopolitical issues, including the Republican Party’s lack of compassion, the dangers of using CRISPR technology to excise “gay genes,” and the marginalization of the black community’s concerns that he witnessed as a newspaper reporter.

Burke’s rambling recollections are by turns nostalgic and wounded. He spends much time rehashing and then forgiving injuries inflicted by everyone from teenage thugs who almost attacked him and co-workers who uttered casual anti-gay slurs to a woman who babysat him in childhood who he imagines would have harbored animus against him had she known he would grow up gay. (“Let kindhearted Mrs. Paulo be the first one I forgive.”) He’s self-lacerating in discussing his own sins, including his defensive paranoia against the “amorphous mass of heterosexuals” he reflexively tags with homophobia—“I have always suspected that every straight person harbors unspoken hateful thoughts of me”—and his subterfuge in inventing a girlfriend to explain his nocturnal outings. (“I consider that with this falsehood I betrayed my mother and descended to a low level indeed.”) These recriminations can make the memoir feel claustrophobic. But whenever Burke looks outside of himself, he manages piquant and entertaining sketches of his surroundings. (“Apparently he will not be spraying Roundup today, nor regaling us with the glories of it and all American products, and deploring the shame of everything French except French wine and French women,” he observes of his gardener in France.) When the author is probing the loss of loved ones—“He smiled at me, and despite his weakness pulled himself part way up on the stretcher, extended his right arm full length, and waved at me,” he writes of Jack’s terminal decline—he’s at his best. In these passages, Burke’s limpid prose is evocative and moving.

A self-involved but sometimes affecting account of the discontents of life in the closet.

In Burke’s debut memoir, he says the things he wishes he could say to people in his past.

Now a senior citizen, Burke looks back on his decades spent as a closeted gay man, keeping his private affairs hidden from his professional life as a journalist and ad writer. That tension was present from a young age, and it kept Burke from speaking up to certain people he knew along the way. The author supplements his narrative with letters to some of these people. There are the predictable figures: parents, former friends, ex-lovers. But there are also letters to more peripheral figures as well, like the group of jocks he briefly hung out with in high school or the disciplinarian nun who served as the school’s principal. There’s a letter to his first boss, a grown man who kissed Burke when he was still a teen, and another to Marie, a girl Burke himself tried to kiss on the first night they met. There are letters to would-be oppressors, like the group of boys who almost beat up Burke and a man while they were on a date or the cops patrolling a cruising boardwalk. Together, they present the interior life of a person who no longer wishes to let things go unsaid. Burke’s conversational prose is often quite moving, as in the very first letter to several classmates he ate lunch with: “You were all really great guys, and I forgive you for the prejudice that a lot of people had then. If we were in school today, would you be tolerant? Most young people are. Let’s go back. I’ll be out as being gay. I bet we’ll still be friends.” The memoir rambles at times, and it gets less urgent once Burke moves into his later years. The reader sometimes wishes the entire book were composed of letters, as they provide an unusual, direct structure. Even so, the work succeeds in charting the shifting position of gay men in America over the last eight decades while also providing the specific story of one man who never got to express himself…until now.

A sprawling, open-hearted memoir of trespasses and reconciliation.