DISORDERLY MEN: A Novel, unnerving in its clarity and emotional acuity...devastating, sleep-robbing historical fiction

DISORDERLY MEN: A Novel
EDWARD CAHILL
Empire State Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$27.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Three gay men in pre-Stonewall New York City find their fates thrown together in the police raid of a Village bar.

Roger Moorhouse is a Wall Street banker and Westchester family man with a preciously guarded secret. As the shouting begins and flashlights blaze in his face, the life he’s carefully curated over the years—a fancy new office overlooking lower Broadway, a house in Beechmont Woods, his wife and children—is about to come crashing down around him.

Columbia literature professor Julian Prince lives a comparatively uncloseted life when he finds his first committed relationship tested to its limits. How could he explain to Gus, a fearless young artist, that he couldn’t stay with him that weekend because the woman who was still technically Julian’s fiancée would be visiting? But when Gus is struck unconscious by a police baton, Julian comes out of hiding to protect him, even if exposure means losing everything.

For Danny Duffy, an Irish kid from the Bronx with a sassy mouth and a diverse group of friends, the raid is a galvanizing, Spartacus moment. Danny doesn’t have too much left to lose; his family has just disowned him. But once his name appears in the newspaper, he’ll be fired from his job at Sloan’s Supermarket, where he’s risen to assistant manager of produce, and begin a journey that veers between political enlightenment and violent revenge.

The three men find themselves in a police wagon together, their hidden lives threatened to be revealed to the world. Blackmail, a private investigator, Gus’s disappearance, and Danny’s quest for retribution propel Disorderly Men to its piercing conclusion, as each man meets the boundaries of his own fear, love, and shame. The stakes for each are different, but all of them confront a fundamental question: How much happiness is he allowed to have . . . and what share of it will he lay claim to?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The chilling truth is that, within my own lifetime, queer life has never been safer than it is now; and it has never been under more sustained attack than it is now.

This novel takes you into the deep, dark chasm of gay males' knife-edge of tolerated behavior when "They" decide to unleash the fury of institutional prejudice on these gay men. It doesn't take much to push an ordinary guy off his place in the socioeconomic pecking order in those times.

What made me feel so afraid was that I had friends and family who were the exact contemporaries of these men. I'd heard similar stories, though not specifically about Stonewall. In that recognition and recollection was a huge ball-peen hammer that hit me again and again. This is the existence the people who drew up Project 2025 believe is the right and proper one for me, men like me, and our siblings across the spectrum of minority behavior. These are the feelings, the troubles, the disasters that they *want*us*to*experience. It is only because, after a while, I felt more like I was reading (good) narrative non-fiction, not a novel, that I was compelled to dock a quarter star off a perfect five.

It's chilling to know this from their own keyboards and placards and gunsights.

I encourage you to read it, cishet, religious, leftist, or simply sentient emotionally literate people. Feel from the inside how this world was for those condemned to it.

Reading truly is resistance.