Got 'til it's gone

As funny, warm, and sexy as its protagonist, Got 'til it's Gone is the first novel by Larry Duplechan in fifteen years, and the fourth to feature his alter-ego Johnnie Ray Rousseau, a gay black man of Louisiana Creole stock. When we first met Johnnie Ray in the 1986 novel Blackbird--the first gay black coming-out novel ever published--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 with some chagrin. 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 twenty-first century.