IT'S A HELLUVA GOD DAMN WORLD

A gay man comes of age in midcentury Chicago in Hanssen-Adams’ novel.

It’s 1946, and 14-year-old Nick Hansen is waiting for the train downtown. His planned purchases that day include an issue of Men’s Health, featuring pictures of male bodybuilders—an indication of his nascent attraction to men. During his wait, he accepts a lift from a 30-ish man named Stan, who takes him to the woods and makes sexual advances. Stan soon begins picking up Nick from school, threatening the teen with blackmail, and eventually raping him. When Nick seeks help from his teachers, they bizarrely blame him for bringing the incident on himself. “I had no friends that I could turn to about something like this…I sat there thinking about what Stan had just said and about what he had done to me….Was I queer, which was the word that he had used?” In high school, Nick meets a few like-minded boys and has sex with a Marine named Doug, but his experience with Stan continues to haunt him as he navigates his sexual identity and the murky world of hookup culture. Eventually, he graduates from high school, finds a job, and even becomes a curious man’s first male sexual partner. Unfortunately for Nick, that man, Allan Miller, is murdered shortly afterward, leading police to suspect that Nick is involved in the killing. Suddenly, the life that Nick has been at pains to keep secret is in danger of being revealed, and he could possibly end up in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

Hanssen-Adams makes it clear that this is a work of fiction, but it’s one that he says is partially inspired by events from his own life. The book’s shape and tone are highly memoiristic, laying out the happenings in Nick’s life in a chronological and episodic manner. A great deal of information is simply reported rather than dramatized in scenes, and the prose has the vague, reflective quality of a diary entry: “We spent a good part of that first day on the beach, which we had pretty much to ourselves. And I have to say that this was the best beach that I had ever seen. It seemed to go on forever, the sand was very fine and there were no rocks or anything else that you had to avoid stepping on.” The book’s greatest strength is in how it depicts aspects of gay life at a time when gay sex was treated as a criminal act and when others’ discovery of one’s sexual orientation could completely undo a person’s life. The interactions between different men—some of whom know what they want and some of whom do not—are a source of great dramatic tension that’s sometimes uplifting, sometimes disturbing, and other times a combination of both. Those looking for a full, novelistic treatment will be disappointed, but readers who are content to enjoy a slice of life from an earlier era will find much of value here.

An imperfect but revealing novel of gay life in the 1940s and ’50s.