CLUBBED

Torrid affairs, parties, heartbreak, and homophobia swirl around a Philadelphia nightclub in this novel about pre-AIDS gay life.

Karl’s exuberant tale starts in 1976, when Joey, a 19-year-old from rural Pennsylvania, inherits an empty factory in Philadelphia and a tidy sum of money. Easing into Philly’s Center City “Gayborhood,” Joey turns the building into a gay disco called Sanctuary. The premises include a basement leather bar called The Hole, complete with a pitch-black orgy room, and an upstairs lesbian oasis called Aphrodite’s Lounge. Sanctuary frames the author’s exploration of the gay lifestyle when it was newly out but not yet widely accepted. Taking center stage is Joey’s happily nonmonogamous relationship with Henry, who manages Sanctuary and acts the stern dom to his partner’s tremulous sub in a rapturous BDSM dynamic. Surrounding them are hot young men, sugar daddies, drag queens, and some characters with their own subplots, including handsome bartenders Lonnie and BJ, the latter known for his enthusiastic fellatio; an unattractive, shunned sad sack who takes to stalking the alpha male DJ; two broke college graduates who act in a gay porn movie and then branch out into dancercise videos; a deeply closeted, homophobic gay man who gets arrested when he gives in to his urges in a restroom; and two transgender sex workers who provide each other a family while plying their risky trade. Karl’s energetic yarn is full of parties, wild outfits, dance-floor seductions, blithe boozing, and drug use—Quaaludes are Joey’s pills of choice—and lots of cheerfully explicit sex scenes. The author cuts the nostalgia with more subdued, even tragic scenes of the darker side of gay life: persistent loneliness; racial discrimination; and hints on the horizon of a nameless new disease. Karl’s prose captures the era’s campy fizz—“Oh Honey, you’re looking ultra fabuloso!”—while deftly evoking psychological depths beneath the glittering surface. (“He bought himself a beer, grabbing his change without leaving a tip, and made his way out to the dance floor,” he writes of a homeless drug addict. “An hour later, he was still dancing by himself, occasionally trying to act like he was dancing with someone, but never making any connections.”) The result is a richly textured take on gay life and loves.

An entertaining, poignant panorama of America’s gay scene in its heedless youth.