You’ve seen the ad on the el.
The boys’ lips meet, forming a bridge to their tongues. They kiss deep and passionately for minutes, until Josh pulls away dizzy, his heart racing at a frantic rate.”I’ve never made love with a man before,” he says.
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So Levin published the book himself. “I felt like when I finished the story I had a golden egg, and I had to get it out for people to read,” he says. He decided to advertise on the el.
In January, 200 placards promoting Sine Die as the book that would “make reading fun again” went up on the Red, Brown, and Blue lines. So far, Levin’s sold 500 books–two-thirds of them to Chicagoans.
When Van Prooyen assigned an essay on the poem “Richard Cory,” Levin wrote that Cory shot himself because he was leading a secret life involving raves and drugs. It was a jab at Grand Rapids’s conformity, and perhaps a hint at Levin’s homosexuality. Van Prooyen was thrilled to find a student who expressed “divergent thought.” They still keep in touch, and she helped edit Sine Die. (The title is a parliamentary term for the final day of a legislative session.)
I liked rock. He said, ‘You’re so macho.’ Finally I asked him, ‘What about the job?’ He said, ‘What you need to do is schedule another interview.’ I never followed up. There are so many closeted legislators on both sides of the aisle. It’s disproportionate.”
King’s mother is even viler: she’s Chinita McCloud Clapton King-Hyde, a political dragon lady who drinks blood, stomps on mice, and schemes to assassinate rivals standing between her son and the speakership. (Why would anyone want to run the Michigan House of Representatives that badly?)