CLUBBED TWO

Philadelphia’s gay community confronts AIDS while trying to hold onto joy in this bittersweet novel.

Karl’s follow-up to Clubbed (2021) finds Joey and his husband, Henry, forging into the 1980s, still managing their nightclub, Sanctuary, as their customers and friends are thinned out by Philadelphia’s AIDS epidemic. There’s a somber edge to the narrative as funerals pile up—one minister officiates at so many that he becomes suicidal—but also a note of defiance and resilience. The gay scene becomes more out and militant as ACT UP and other activist organizations speak out and offer help to stricken patients. Joey and Henry declare their pride by emblazoning Sanctuary’s outer wall with a mural of James Baldwin. There’s plenty of fun still to be had, with each fundraiser furnishing a pretext for a costume pageant—Joey enlists the drag queen BaeBae to help him perfect his Cabaret-vintage Liza Minnelli—and Spanking Sundays remaining a Sanctuary fixture. And the sex barely slows down as Joey and Henry continue bringing strangers home for orgies—two swimmers they meet in San Francisco, the cute guy at the animal shelter—while carefully following safe-sex procedures that pose no impediment to volcanic climaxes. (They steer clear of the nihilistic “gifting parties”—unprotected orgies—that kill some of their acquaintances.) Karl’s writing is even more vigorous and lubricious here than in Clubbed, as Joey continues to happily subordinate himself to the bullish dom Henry and they indulge in new kinks in lascivious detail. At one point, Joey relates: “That’s when they put their feet close together, so Henry’s right big toe was next to Dagen’s left big toe, and I swallowed both of their big toes at once, enjoying the taste, the smell, and the knowledge that both of these men would never forget how they joined forces to place me in a position of extreme submission.” But the author also explores less frothy realities, like the hardships a disabled veteran faces in navigating Sanctuary and the plangent insecurity of an unattractive gay man: “I don’t want to accept who I am….I want to be pretty too!” The result is a complex, engrossing vision of a gay scene that’s determined to find solidarity and pleasure amid the pain.

A moving take on the AIDS tragedy, with the pathos cut by jaunty sex scenes.