Larry Duplechan – författare

First published by St. Martin’s in 1986, Blackbird is a funny, moving, gay coming-of-age novel about growing up black and gay in Southern California. The lead character, Johnnie Ray Rousseau, is a high school student upset at losing the lead role in the school staging of Romeo and Juliet; if that weren’t enough, his best friend has been beaten badly by his father, and his girlfriend is pressuring him to have sex for the first time. All the while, he’s intrigued by Marshall MacNeill, a fellow drama class member who’s surely the sexiest man to walk God’s green earth—at least according to Johnnie Ray. This novel of adolescent awakening is as fresh and heartfelt as it was when first published. Features an introduction by Michael Nava.

This is the first novel by Larry Duplechan in fifteen years, and the fourth to feature his alter ego protagonist Johnnie Ray Rousseau, a gay black man of Louisiana Creole stock. When we first met Johnnie Ray in the novel Blackbird, he was a gay teenager in love with the star of a high school play; now he’s forty-eight, still handsome and gym-built, but admittedly vain and looking down the short road to fifty. In the midst of a midlife crisis, he falls for a much younger man with some serious Daddy issues; throughout it all, Johnnie Ray tries to look at love (and his life) from both sides now (to borrow a phrase from his idol Joni Mitchell). Got ’Til It’s Gone is a queer romantic comedy for the ages.

Larry Duplechan is the author of four previous novels, including Blackbird, published in a new edition by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2006. He is a deacon at the Metropolitan Community Church in the Valley in North Hollywood, California.