The late James Robert Baker was never a poster boy for the politically
correct. He was an angry, impassioned,
brash writer with a decidedly skewed take on gay life, Hollywood life,
AIDS life, love life, and, heck, life in general.
His two cult-fave gay novels, Adrenaline and Tim and Pete,
unapologetic jackhammers of anti-right,
anti-homophobe, anti-corporate invective, were despised by polite gays,
embraced by activist queers, and garnered
both hostile reviews and exuberant word-of-mouth. I'm glad to say that
Adrenaline, published 15 years ago under the
pseudonym of James Dillinger, is back in print. It's the story of two
lusty gay fugitives on the lam in early-1980s
Los Angeles, an erotic noir thriller which set the teeth of early AIDS
activists on edge.
Its reappearance three
years after the author's suicide coincides with the publication of
Testosterone, a frantic, ferocious last novel,
polished to completion by Alyson editor Scott Brassart, which with
cheerful cheekiness and searing bitterness
chronicles the descent into obsessive, murderous madness of one Dean
Seagrave. His compelling revenge fantasy is redacted by one "James
Robert Baker" from six cassette tapes that popped unbidden into the
author's mailbox. It's a clever storytelling conceit for a drama-driven
and blood-drenched novel in which Seagrave caroms through
auto-centric Los Angeles, searching for his ex-lover Pablo Ortega with
an ice cooler at his feet awaiting the severed
head of the gorgeous man who one day up and vanished. Gruesome, yes, and
unsettling, but original, insane, and brilliant.
-- Richard Labonté
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