Got 'Til it's Gone

This is the first novel by Larry Duplechan in fifteen years, and the fourth to feature his alter ego protagonist Johnnie Ray Rousseau, a gay black man of Louisiana Creole stock. When we first met Johnnie Ray in the novel "Blackbird," he was a gay teenager in love with the star of a high school play; now he's forty-eight, still handsome and gym-built, but admittedly vain and looking down the short road to fifty. In the midst of a midlife crisis, he falls for a much younger man with some serious Daddy issues; throughout it all, Johnnie Ray tries to look at love (and his life) from both sides now (to borrow a phrase from his idol Joni Mitchell). "Got 'Til It's Gone "is a queer romantic comedy for the ages.

Larry Duplechan is the author of four previous novels, including "Blackbird," published in a new edition by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2006. He is a deacon at the Metropolitan Community Church in the Valley in North Hollywood, California.