A Friend of Dorothy’s
Playwright Richard Willett’s
Controversial Lost Novel of The Eighties
Richard Willett’s novel A Friend of Dorothy’s, a coming of age novel set at the start of the AIDS epidemic in 1980s New York City, will be published on May 15th, 2025.
Richard Willett wrote A Friend of Dorothy’s when he was in his twenties. It was excerpted in the legendary gay literary magazine Christopher Street and in Permafrost, the literary journal of the University of Alaska, and it was slated to be published by Gay Men’s Press in England, when they were acquired by an American company that apparently wanted only to publish pornography. Richard’s book was off the list, and he put the manuscript in a drawer. He proceeded to publish ten short stories, have multiple play productions in New York and elsewhere, and win awards as a fiction writer, playwright, and screenwriter. His agent for the novel once said, after receiving a pile of rejection letters praising the book highly, “By the time this thing is finally published it’s going to be a period piece.” Well, here it is. Period and all.
“We have all the time in the world,
my sweet beautiful man.”
It was the ending that scared off even gay editors in the early 1990s. An intimate victory dance of overt gay male sexuality at a time when not just silence = death, but for many sex = death. Now, perhaps, readers will be more open to celebrating it.
It’s 1986 in New York City and 27-year-old Eric Summerfield knows that “yuppies” are supposed to be obnoxious, easily dismissed, but he envies the clarity of their delusions, their seeming ability to keep mortality at bay. He yearns, in fact, to be one of them. The catch: He’s no Wall Street insider, but instead the underpaid employee of a Canadian chain bookstore in Midtown Manhattan, a Canuck himself, and gay, and AIDS suddenly seems to be everywhere, including in the body of his flamboyant friend and coworker Dale, who inexplicably singles out a reluctant Eric to be his chief caregiver. It’s an experience that will change both of them.
Moving back and forth across time and place from youth in the 1960s and ’70s–Eric’s in Vancouver, Dale’s on a farm in Kansas—to the pressure cooker of New York in the gay eighties, A Friend of Dorothy’s is also a timeless, universal coming of age novel, in which the crucible of illness compels one young man to reach for something greater.
“Nothing can have prepared you for the wit and insight, the eccentricity and inspiring optimism with which this consistently surprising young writer depicts a year at the heart of his generation’s greatest calamity.”—Joseph Pintauro, author of Cold Hands and Raft of the Madusa
“There is a knowingness, a sense of timing, a compassion and forgiveness under all the action, character to character. What Richard Willett has—in abundance—is love for the people he is chronicling and, by recording, saving.”—Allan Gurganus, author of The Practical Heart, Plays Well with Others, and Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
“The writing is poignant, realistic and fine; the reader is pierced and instantly seduced by the characters’ appeal and immediacy.”—Harlan Greene, author of The German Officer’s Boy, What the Dead Remember, and Why We Never Danced the Charleston