You’re Never Too Old

Philip Gambone’s long-awaited second book of short stories takes off from where his highly acclaimed first collection ended, taking us now into the lives of older gay men, their adventures and challenges, heartaches, and joys. Set largely in Boston, these sixteen loosely interconnected new stories are about men who have experienced and witnessed a lot: marriages and break-ups, rekindling old loves and starting new romances with unlikely partners; the search for sex in an online era; the loss of familiar gay culture; the death of loved ones due to old age, sickness, and AIDS; and always the adventure of living in a world where they have to make up the rules as they go along.

Gambone takes us to a radical faerie wedding, a closeted French teacher’s classroom, the weekly café gathering of a group of older gay bohemians, a randy eighty-year-old portrait painter who insists his clients pose in the nude, a gay man who discovers his brother is HIV positive, a man in a wheelchair who hires a straight, 23-year-old companion, another who periodically hooks up with a married man half his age, and a long-married gay couple whose weekly visits to a sports café in Boston’s Italian neighborhood presents a delicious and dangerous temptation.

Some of these men fight the temptation to live nostalgically in the past; others embrace the new opportunities that come with deeper insight and age.  Whatever the case, in each story, Gambone explores how, as older gay men, each of his characters ultimately arrives at a place of greater equanimity, self-acceptance, wisdom, and even spiritual growth.

Now, these “ordinary gay men” have reached a new, more complex stage in their lives, where the pull of multiple responsibilities, conflicting desires, and cross-generational connections both enriches and test the identities they’ve built up over the years. Exhilarating, heart-warming, sexy, and very real—these stories zigzag through the twists and turns of each character’s life toward a place where gratitude, peace, clarity, and joy radiantly triumph.

Praise for Zigzag

“Zigzag is a wonderful marvel of the literary imagination. Gorgeously written but colloquial, witty but deeply felt, quotidian but wonderfully insightful – it is how gay men live today. Gambone is that person sitting next to you in a café observing, listening, and getting every detail, down to the smallest gesture and the slightest quivering of the voice, exactly right. These are men he knows, men that we know, and they come alive here as they grapple with love, loss, grief, and joy. Few writers can so accurately capture the tapestry of urban gay male life with such acuity and compassion.”

—Michael Bronski, author of A Queer History of the United States

“People who complain that all gay fiction portrays hustlers, drag queens and sex machines have never read Philip Gambone, who writes with great clarity and fidelity about ordinary gay Americans.”

—Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story

“In this collection of fully realized, fully fleshed portraits of gay men of a certain age, Philip Gambone reveals the rich, complicated, empowering history that defines a generation. These men are pioneers and survivors — but still growing and still learning. Storytelling at its best.”

—William Mann, author of The Men from the Boys

“Gambone peoples his fiction as concisely in age and place as Updike and Calisher, and like them, he approaches his characters with a wry, yet mostly affectionate understanding. If all else was lost, future historians might be able to piece together a place and era from Zigzag. Readers will come away from this rich collection of stories with an entire world.”

—Felice Picano, author of Like People in History

 “Phil Gambone’s powerful stories evoke the lives of gay men of a certain age as they grapple with loss and find fresh hope. By turns sexy, funny and poignant the result is a queer generational group portrait imbued with humanity and buoyed by a sense of joy.”

—Raphael Kadushin, editor of Wonderlands

“Philip Gambone’s gemlike stories are often as profound and multilayered as his full-length books. He sees the world with an empathy, both humorous and heartbreaking, and his characters are surprising, sometimes beguiling, but always complex.”

—Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin

“Deeply observed, exquisitely precise, and elegantly told, Philip Gambone’s stories in Zigzag explore the twists and turns of love, lust, regret, and hope in modern maturity.”

—Joseph O’Malley, author of Great Escapes from Detroit

“These pensive, touching stories, told mostly from the viewpoint of older gay men, are post-AIDS stories. The principal characters are the ones who survived. Some have gone on to form couples or bands of friends; others find themselves alone. But all are looking back to the decades of gay life in which they came out, fell in love (or lust), broke up, stayed together, found callings or lost them, watched people they loved become sick and die. How moving they are, how honest with and about themselves! This is the book I would give a nephew or grandson, gay or straight, if I wanted them to know who I was and who I’d been.”

—Reed Woodhouse. author of Unlimited Embrace

“Zigzag is vintage Phil Gambone—considered, humane, full of longing—but also something bracingly fresh: an intimate portrait of gay aging. He writes frankly (and wittily, and sexily) about men who find themselves reckoning with the perils and pleasures of having survived beyond what “gayness” signifies in the cultural imagination. A great choice for queer book clubs!”

—Michael Lowenthal, author of The Paternity Test

“Phil Gambone’s new collection is the bitterest and the sweetest of the bittersweet. Such a glorious set of stories.”

—Brian Bouldrey, author of The Good Pornographer

“Like the best work of Christopher Isherwood. This new collection contains slices of contemporary life among men of a certain age who’ve experienced enormous changes in the world. We see old wounds from the past, the games played by long-term gay couples, the delicate marriage of a high school French teacher, the challenge of illness, and a wild and witty account of a radical faerie wedding in rural New England. These stories are as unpredictable and real as the lives of our own friends”

—Christopher Bram, author of Father of Frankenstein

“The great short stories, from de Maupassant and Chekhov to Cheever, balance their authors’ deep understanding of character with their fascination with place. The stories in Zigzag, Philip Gambone’s touchingly real, tender, and sexy collection dealing with gay life in Boston, share those same qualities of being alive in a city he obviously loves and living through every crucial, telling moment with his thoroughly, humanly attractive characters.”

—Lloyd Schwartz, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic

“In Zigzag, Philip Gambone deftly employs so many of the qualities I cherish in the best short stories: wit, frankness, economy, vulnerability. Every story in this collection erupts with the hopes and hungers of people you’ll recognize, characters navigating through the high-stakes emotional landscape that lies beneath the drama of our everyday lives.”

—K.M. Soehnlein, author of The World of Normal Boys

“Zigzag is a wonderful collection, an examination of and tribute to aging and community that is totally absorbing, beautifully written, and wise. Just when you think you know where a story is going, Philip Gambone makes a turn—sometimes startling, always satisfying.”

—Patrick Merla, editor of Boys Like Us