Pioneers

Title: Pioneers
Author: Lynn Lorenz
Publisher: Amber Allure
Genre: Contemporary m/m, historical m/m (1950’s)
Length: Novella
Rating: 4.75 of 5 stars

A Guest Review by Feliz

Summary Review: A quiet, funny, erotic, colorful, not – quite memoir of a gay man’s eventful life in New Orleans from the 1950’s until today.

The Blurb: When Matt films a documentary of gay men living in New Orleans over the last fifty years, his first subject is none other than Sebastian LaGrange, his very own landlord.  The elderly gentleman has lived through good times and bad, has seen and done it all, and Matt thinks he’s perfect for the project. Although Sebastian is initially reluctant, he comes to believe in the project, and opens up his life like never before, telling his story from the first time he kissed a boy, to the present.

What Matt uncovers is not only a story of being gay in their beloved city, but he unravels the mysterious past of one of New Orleans’s most desired gay men. Sebastian has been a friend and mentor to Matt and his partner Lane, and even in his old age, Sebastian has even more to teach them about love…

The Review:

The first sentence of this book reads like this:

“…it was the fifties, lamb chop. One didn’t come out of the closet, one tiptoed out.”  Sebastian wiggled two ring – bedecked fingers in the air as if they were walking.  “And then one tiptoed right back in.”

Isn’t it awesome? One single sentence and you can see him, the seventy- something,  distinguished gentleman, unashamedly camp and yet showing an endearing amount of self-mockery which will forever keep him from being crude. For this one sentence, I wanted to adopt Sebastian as my very own Uncle Queen. I wanted to sit at his feet and listen breathlessly to him as he tells  the story of his life.

This is pretty much what Matt does, the young filmmaker who’s interwiewing Sebastian for his documentary.  Matt and his partner Lane are Sebastian’s tenants, living in the former slave quarters behind Sebastian’s house.  (Matt’s and Lane’s story is told in the first instalment in this series, Pinky Swear, reviewed by Wave here.) And Sebastian’s life makes a story very much worth listening to. After all, you’d never guess looking at the carefully groomed elderly gentleman sitting in his dinner jacket among the costly antiques in his fine house that he gathered his first sexual experiences in a filthy public bathroom, sucking a stranger’s dick.  During his younger years,  Sebastian was much in demand for his gorgeous body, but he fell for the wrong man over and over again and had his heart broken several times over. The last man he dared to give his heart to, Frank, even did one better than Sebastian’s former lovers, he died and took Sebastian’s heart with him. So Sebastian has spent the last twenty years alone. Recently, he’s starting to feel the weight of his years, although he won’t admit this to anyone, not even himself, carefully keeping up his facade.

But talking to Matt about the past brings Sebastian face to face with his own mortality, which leads to him reliving old memories. We receive Sebastian’s story in two different ways, partly through the things he tells Matt in his own voice (the sentence above being a good example for Sebastian’s endearingly affected and ironic manner of speaking) and partly through flashbacks, told in Sebastian’s third person’s POV. This makes for a varied and engaging read; scenes and people come alive on the pages as we follow Sebastian’s way from his raunchy youth through his happy middle years with Frank to Frank’s dying day, which was truely heartbreaking.

Aside from Sebastian, Matt and Lane, this story has another main character, albeit a mute one, a little hidden but far from just being the backdrop. It’s the city of New Orleans, the only place on earth where Sebastian could have lived his life the way he did, and the only place where gentlemen like him could still exist in our days. From the little details like Mardi Grass beads still hanging in the trees after six months to the encounters in cafe’s and restaurants that mark Sebastian’s various relationships up to the last scene, where we see Sebastian finding a new lease of life in a fast food chain retaurant, of all places, New Orleans is always present, a grand old lady in drag, slightly disheveled after Catrina, but alive and kicking, and smiling through the dirt.

On a less poetic note, this story had a few minor flaws, too. For one, it isn’t entirely a standalone story, at least in regard to Matt and Lane. True, the focus is on Sebastian here, but the younger couple get some on-page time too. There are just enough hints to keep the reader from walking entirely in the dark about them, but it certainly helps if you’ve read Pinky Swear. And, for another thing, the story ended rather abruptly, like almost every other book by this author does (and it’s really the only thing about Lynn Lorenz’s books that drives me absolutely nuts, her endings, but well, that may be just me).

So if you’re looking for a fulfilling, pleasant and very well-written story, go for this book, you won’t go wrong.