Portions of Promise

We have in "Portions of Promise" a gay novel of extraordinary scope and reach with a cast of characters fitting for an epic of any century. The story, with spinoffs all over the place, originates with the building of a mansion in 1868-71 by Barnaby Bosworth Clipwell II, scion of the Clipwell America Corporation. In a wish to escape the congestion and noise of San Francisco, he chose the small, somewhat backward city of Santa Buena in California's Great Central Valley. There, this effetely fatigued man built a mansion of intimidating presence at 13th and T Streets on the river flatlands south of the city. He named it Bosworth Manor. Later, about 150 years later, the latest and presumably last Clipwell America heir, Hart Garrison "Clipper" Clipwell, at age 96, decides to turn Bosworth Manor into a retirement home for low-income gay people. But unfortunately Clipper is brutally murdered in a random home invasion. Black attorney Marvin Curl (Clipper's son from a long ago affair with black jazz singer Leona Lorde in Paris, France, father and son just recently reconciled) into whose hands the success of the Clipper Clipwell Gay Retirement Home had been placed, is himself incapacitated after having been attacked and beaten at an anti-violence rally staged by the Reverend Creighton Flowers. There are entities in Santa Buena interested in gaining control of Bosworth Manor: the Registry of Noted Santa Buena Homes, the Greater Delta Transit Authority, the Temple of Apostolic Consecration, and the City of Santa Buena, which is seeking to collect about $297,000 in delinquent property taxes going way back. Thus is set a battle that rages, in it own peculiar way, across the hapless valley city. Coming into play in this affair is a diversity of individuals, ranging from gay radical playwright George Worth; gay homemaker of unquestioned excellence Rudy Hernandez and his random-thinking lover Jessup Allen Burchfield; Colby Warden, sweet young thing of conniving ways; Leander Mitchell seeking to be gay his way and only his way; gay consignment shopkeepers Hector Lapier and Philip Cousins; Tommy "Pucker" Pomegrado, popular bartender at the tacky downhome gay bar Catastrophe; aspiring gay journalist Mabel Methane aka Daryl Motrius; gay pollution tracker and his friend Sammy Hollister, former cutie-boy prostitute; and grandest of all Rhonda Estelle, one time lesbian Las Vegas showgirl. And then there's handsome Teddy Bess, gay restauranteur cool in always with a eye going up, coming out of, as he did, Baltimore's Stinky Bottom; Stetson Schuey, longtime building contractor with thoughts of the noble. And Randy Wilkerson, craftily idealistic attorney for the Clipwell Foundation after 20 years in stir for grand theft auto, multiple counts. It's a wild (sort of) spin into the come around disaster in the essence of progress and the final, rightful kind of comeuppance that does the soul good and encourages an anticipatory look into a better future. The writing is in the main standard narrative, times of elegance, times of expedience essential in well-crafted dialogue moving the story forward. There are spates of poetry, and way more than spates of experimental narration, as in mighty paragraphs pages and pages long, dialogue tucked in as are the essential parts of an extended banquet. For all the delicate rampage of this massive tome (859 pages) the reader is never neglected in the word for thought contract. Perusal is always pleasant and plausible from beginning to end. What we have here is speculative inquiry into the sustaining backgrounds of gay people who may or may not have been who they seemed to be but are always on the lookout for some or other portion of promise. Read more