NOVEL

It’s summer in the city in 1997.  New York’s downtown art scene is flourishing.  Digital photography is changing the way we see the world.  Against this backdrop handsome portraitist, Steven, meets Yale Alumni Relations Director, James, and falls in love.  And it’s great, except that James is just recently out,’still married, and for his kids’ sake, living with his wife, Terri, and their three young daughters in New Haven.  A problem Steven’s willing to work with, because James is truly special.  

 Steven’s pretty special too.  He’s a successful photographer, currently working with his assistant, Jade, on a cutting edge digital photography project—a photomosaic self-portrait comprised of moments from his life.  Steven and Jade are friends, soul-mates even, who’ve grown to love and respect one another in the months since she took the job.  And their friendship doesn’t threaten Jade’s relationship with her fiancé, Cullen, a handsome, rising star in the world of Southern politics.  What does threaten it is that Cullen lives in Atlanta, and even though she can’t articulate it, Jade’s just a little bit in love with her gay boss in NYC.  But is Steven really even gay?  He’d been with women in the past, until a bad affair left him denying his bi-sexuality and opting to live exclusively as a gay man.

 At its core, BOTH is about three friends trapped in a world that demands they conform to society’s acceptable norms and questions the veracity of their inherent natures.  In their struggles to live their respective truths, they find one another and help each other break free. Only in so doing, each of them ends up caught between two opposing loves, in three intersecting love triangles, making BOTH  an impossible love story—a romance coupling the metaphor that life is essentially a mosaic of our own creation, with a searing exploration of the ambiguities of sexual identity and the true power of love.