Looking Back at a Long Queer Life
Three Novellas
Looking Back at a Long Queer Life brings together three novellas originally published in parts on Substack from 2023 to 2025.
Together they form a collective work following the life of NARRATOR, the central character of all three, as he discovers his queerness and learns to live as a confident, comfortable queer man through the first eight decades of the 20th Century, in a world that does not always make that an easy path.
All three are fiction based on history, intended to give modern readers a view into an earlier time, when being queer could be risky, but also thrilling, as a new queer world emerged, in an avant-garde metropolis such as Paris, and also in the American cities, Houston and St. Louis.
After a youth spent in Paris, explored in Song of the Amorous Frogs: A Paris Story of the 1920s, followed by a decade of maturing and mellowing in his hometown, Houston, Left Bank on the Bayou: A Queer Houston Story of the 1930s, NARRATOR rejoins his two Great Loves from earlier days, in St. Louis, and grows old, as he makes his way through one Joycean day of traveling back in memory through a queer lifetime, An Old Man and His Memories.
Bringing together all these parts, published over multiple years, is the next step toward publishing them as an e-book - not quite there yet, but getting closer. If you go to the Substack app, you can even listen to them being read by AI Oliver, who’s not at all bad.
Special thanks to all who have been with me through the many parts that have made this whole possible. And thanks also to you who may be looking at them for the first time. I appreciate all of you for taking a look - and I hope you find something in them to enjoy. Best, Randy.
Song of the Amorous Frogs: A Paris Story of the 1920s