4.75⭐️ rounded up!

I sometimes feel as if these adamant young queers think that everyone older than they are cowered in the face of homophobia because we lacked backbones. They don’t realize how our lives were picked apart for an infraction as tiny as a kiss. They don’t seem to grasp that the penalty for their brand of civil disobedience used to be death. I can take them to the cemetery plot of the bravest gay man I ever knew. Like everyone else born before a movement gains critical mass, he was silenced so that his voice could not convert too many others.

A love letter to old Hollywood from the audiences that continue to get ignored to this day, this book is perfect for fans of Hail, Caesar! and the Blank Check podcast. It is less of a Hollywood noir/murder mystery than I expected going in (those elements really don’t come into play until the last several chapters), but I was still utterly charmed by the novel. A romance that is doomed before the story even begins, but nevertheless fails to pull you in with enough name drops and references to pique the attention of even the most novice cinephile. Sex is not the forefront of the novel, but the sex scenes that do exist are written with a combination of tenderness and sensuality that has been missing from my last several reads with sexual content. I am probably grading this on a bit of a curve because it’s about two of my favorite things (being gay and movies), but I was chomping at the bit for this book to come out and it did not disappoint me in the slightest — other than perhaps that slight shift of genre expectation I had to do. I absolutely adore this book, definitely my favorite 2026 release I’ve gotten my hands on so far.

Side note: This is the second book I’ve read this year that has referenced The City of Night by John Rechy. Maybe I should finally dust that off my bookshelf and read it.