Temple Slave

The author of the play Kennedy's Children and long a presence in New York theatre, Patrick's autobiographical first novel delves into the outlaw history of Off-Off Broadway and the simultaneous dawning of gay liberation. Ground zero is a cafe in New York City's Greenwich Village called Espresso Buono, where, in the early '60s, writers, actors and directors are nurtured in almost fatherly fashion by the cafe's owner, Joe Buono. The narrator, Bob Patrick, acts as the cafe's court stenographer, recording each moment as it unfolds. The events, whether they happened precisely as Patrick indicates or not, ring true, and his characters are humorously, even fatally, human. They are by turns arrogant and humorous, and confronted alternately by promises of a sexual paradise and by visions of an abyss. Part and parcel of Temple Slave is its gay pedigree and courage to reconstruct the erotic nature of those times. The sheer quantity of the recollections make the book lengthy, but it is still compelling. From the conformist '50s to the first shrill yowls of the AIDS era, Temple Slave fills the gap between Jeb and Dash and And the Band Played On and characterizes the time as heady, nihilistic, experimental and, above all, worthy of nostalgia. (June)