Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud

Rating: 3.9* of fiveThe Book Report: A novella of love found, opportunity grabbed, and cute nebbish nabs heartthrob for a happily ever after.Ted is the makeup artist you want for your f/x heavy film. He's 27, he's gay, he's peaking...and he's alone in life.Len is the actor you want for your action flick. He's 29, he's a wall of muscle, and mirabile dictu he can act...man oh man can he act, as Ted's about to find out.These boys met cute 10 years before, in regional theatre, and being clueless teens never figured out how to break the ice with each other. Now, thanks to producers with plans, the second chance we all, every living one of us, long for with someone...the one who got away...comes to these lucky, lucky men. For a wonder, they don't screw it up. That's how you know it's a novella.My Review: It's a romance, not some damned po-mo angsty four-hankies-and-a-pistol read! Get it? Good fun in a good story well told by a writer whose ability to make her readers buy into an implausible plot is top flight.It's the enduring appeal of mysteries and romances that Justice is Done and things end up Right. It's never more satisfying that things ending up Right for a group of people who don't get a lot of that in Real Life, like gay men and lesbians.However much better things are for me and mine than they've been in a long, long time, the forces of negativity are still marching, carrying signs, starting lawsuits, shouting and beating and snarling at us wherever we go. A fantasy respite is hugely welcome under those circumstances. But then there's the strange and unexplainable sense of, well, rightness maybe? or comfortable familiarity? neither, both, and more, validation and vindication...the pleasaunce, to repurpose an old word, the sense of coming into a beautiful garden made for you.I just cannot tell you how sick I am of reading about straight people's marital issues, their hook-ups, the woman getting abused in some way and never ever so much as once (very much unlike my and many other mens' life) perpetrating meanness nastiness and abuse. When something speaks to me, to my desires both physical and psychical, it is a delight.And it's not like it was for men who came before me, either! My mother's brother, poor bastard, never came out, stayed married to a refrigerator, raised his kids and did his expected Naval officer thing, never daring to read a Gordon Merrick novel, watch a gay porn flick, nothing that spoke to him directly, until after the refrigerator died and I sent him all my old VHS porn and one-handed reading.I wish he was still with us. I'd give him this novella. "See, Uncle Bubba? It can mean love, being in love, loving someone who loves you back. We get to have that now."