THE TUXEDO SOCIETY

A struggling young actor is recruited to help an all-gay special ops team save the world.

At 25, Andrew Birnbaum is nice-looking and talented at both acting and singing. He loves comedy and improv and can do a one-man version of Wicked, playing everybody, in under 10 minutes, though only close friends have seen it. He’s barely paying the rent on his basement apartment in the far reaches of the East Village selling scented candles at a store called Smells of the Season when his best friend, Brock, invites him to a meeting of a dinner club called the Tuxedo Society. There he meets a delightful and diverse group of gentlemen and ladies whose professions involve everything from luxury real estate to selling replacement china on the internet; there’s a Navy SEAL, an OnlyFans star, and a former Olympic swimmer. While visiting the men’s room, he witnesses a wild encounter involving several of the tuxedoed diners that leaves two dead, no-goodniks who were part of a group intending to assassinate the first lady. Turns out, Andrew is being recruited to join a group of LGBTQ+ superheroes for his ability at improv—and the next thing he knows, he’s at the White House impersonating a cater waiter, helping to foil the next attempt on the life of Reata Pershing, an absolute goddess of a Black first lady whose fabulousness and wardrobe selections were certainly inspired by Michelle Obama. Andrew proves to be a lot better at this work than he would have thought, and his action-packed escapades with the Tuxedo Society take him to Paris, the Vatican, and beyond. Rudnick jams more comic energy into a single sentence than seems physically possible, his agile metaphors flying like gymnasts across the page: “My erection wasn’t my fault, because he was deliberately done up as British librarian/Nobel finalist clickbait, like Eddie Redmayne in any British biopic where he crosses an Oxford quad in October, hunched from calculating a theorem or composing a sonnet.” His descriptions of the attire at the papal residence alone are worth the price of admission.

If wild queer comedy can somehow be used to thwart evil and bring about world peace, this is the book that will save us.