A husband by law Book

Like Edmund White's "City Boy", Picano's memoir addresses gay life in the 1970s/80s in New York City. The first half of the book focuses on his struggle (and eventual success) to become a published writer; in the second half he recalls the tremendous freedom and community he found as a full-time summer resident of The Pines, a gay-centric village on Fire Island, off the southern coast of Long Island. Picano certainly experienced the sexual and brother-loving heyday of The Pines (and of the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan) and he writes beautifully of relationships with many men that weren't exclusively "dating" or just acquaintances but rather ongoing, deeply loving friendships that sometimes included sexual components (and sometimes didn't).

Picano lived through an astounding time, pre-plague, one of a small band of hard-working, upwardly mobile gay men who found themselves young, professionally successful, and increasingly happy with their sexualized lives and increasing visibility. That Picano (like White) lived to tell about these things is a wonder; it's also a bitter pill for a post-plague reader to swallow. Impossible for me as a gay man to read it and not weep for what I was too young to have known. Impossible, too, to read without knowing that virtually all of the lives Picano writes about are long-extinguished.