'Disorderly Men' by Edward Cahill

Disorderly Men

Author: Edward Cahill

Rating: A

Vibe: A historical novel that doubles as an emotional reckoning, anchored by one of the best gay characters I've read in years and a long-overdue embrace of queer rage as a legitimate moral response

In the early 1960s in New York City, a vice cop walks into Caesar's, a Greenwich Village gay bar, and turns on the lights. Three men get loaded into the same paddy wagon and have their names printed in the next morning's paper, and that's the night the rest of their lives start. Roger is a Westchester banker, married, a father, a war veteran—the kind of carefully gray-flanneled man who only comes into the city for occasional secret nights and looks down on the "fairies" who actually live there. Julian is a Columbia professor with a morals clause in his contract and a boyfriend, Gus, an artist who's far more comfortable being gay than Julian is. Danny is the assistant produce manager at a grocery store in Queens, twenty-something, working class, alone. Once his name hits the paper, he loses his job, his family disowns him, and he is left with nothing—except a slowly rising, gorgeous, generative fury that becomes the engine of Disorderly Men.

I loved this book. Edward Cahill has written a debut novel that reads like it was written by someone three novels in—confident, patient, structurally elegant, and absolutely fearless about letting his characters be morally complicated. The plot mechanics (a blackmailer, a private investigator, Gus's disappearance, Danny's quest for retribution) are propulsive enough to keep you turning pages, but the real engine of the book is interior. Each of these three men is at a different point in his relationship to his own gayness, and Cahill lets them be exactly where they are without judging any of them. Roger's self-loathing and snobbery, Julian's careful intellectual distance, Danny's raw working-class ferocity—they're allowed to be themselves, to make terrible choices, to disappoint us, to surprise us.

And Danny. God, Danny. He is one of my favorite gay characters in anything I've read in the last several years, and the reason is simple: Cahill lets him be angry. Not noble-suffering angry. Not respectability-politics angry. Angry angry. Vengeful. Politically awakening. Willing to consider violence. The book takes seriously the idea that rage is a legitimate response to being criminalized for existing, and that for a gay man with no money, no family, and no institutional protection, fury might be the only tool he has left. M/M fiction is full of soft, healing, forgiving gay characters—and I love them, those books are valid—but it is genuinely rare to see a gay protagonist allowed to be furious in the way Danny gets to be furious.

I also learned a lot. I knew the broad shape of pre-Stonewall persecution, but the specifics here—the way arrest records were weaponized, the morals clauses, the entrapment, the hierarchy among gay men based on how visibly gay they were, the role newspapers played in destroying lives by simply printing names—are rendered with the kind of detail that comes from real research. Cahill is an English professor at Fordham, and the historian's care shows.

A solid A. Disorderly Men is a beautiful, smart, necessary novel about the moment right before the modern gay rights movement got its match struck—and a reminder that we got here in part because some of our forefathers got mad and stayed that way. Read it for the history. Stay for Danny.