Closets & Highways

Two gay novels, two very different escape routes. This week: Edward Cahill's Disorderly Men against Joe Westmoreland's Tramps Like Us.

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Disorderly Men drops us into early-'60s New York, where a raid on a Greenwich Village bar throws three men — a closeted banker, a professor, and a grocery clerk — into the same paddy wagon and the same impossible question: how much happiness am I allowed? A pre-Stonewall thriller soaked in shame and blackmail.

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Tramps Like Us takes the other door — Westmoreland's autofictional road trip out of an abusive Kansas City home andinto the hedonistic sprawl of '70s New Orleans and San Francisco, all sex, drugs, and chosen family, right up to the edge of the AIDS crisis.

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One book about hiding, one about running. We talk about which one wrecked us more.