Everybody Loves You: Further Adventures in Gay Manhattan

The subtitle of this witty collection of stories, the conclusion of a trilogy begun with I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore and continued in Buddies , is slightly misleading: the ``adventures'' are really no more than a series of parties, dinners and moonlit conversations, and their world extends beyond Manhattan to Woodstock, Fire Island and London. The narrator is Bud, a middle-aged gay writer who mediates the emotional traumas of his best friend Dennis Savage, Dennis's flighty, frenetic lover Little Kiwi and Cosgrove, an unschooled, manipulative teenager whom the older men take in. With passion and wit, Mordden depicts their quest to maintain pride in the face of prejudice, and hope in the age of AIDS. Some readers will quarrel with the unduly insular portrayal of homosexuality as a world of artifice and theatricality, and with the author's assertion that ``all gays are born actors, selecting the role they feel most secure in.'' But the finest of these stories break away from those cliches to create touching portraits of men in conflict and conciliation with an often hostile world. (September)