Scott PomfretCritiques

Funny and moving personal battle with the Church over its anti-gay stand.

Hot Sauce didn't hold my attention like Razor Burn did. Razor Burn took place in a business world I understand — marketing. High fashion and gourmet cooking are not my thing so all the descriptions of cooking and dressing got rather boring after awhile. That leaves a man, Brad, who is too insecure to confide in his boyfriend and the boyfriend, Troy, who is too clueless to ask Brad what's on his mind. Then there is Aria the overdone killjoy who is so obviously not Troy's type to be an unbelievable character. All of the "tension" between the two men is forced and the chemistry just doesn't seem as believable as it was for the main characters in Razor Burn.

E-male is a pure classic romance novel. It has not any pretence to be anything else if not a light romp. Kory Miles is a geeky guy working as waiter while he is trying to build a successful online dating website. He is so good in his work that the website is a endless source of good matching but there is a problem: no complicated algorithm calculates the best matching, it’s all in Kory’s mind and good sense. Problem is that e-male is also starting to “eat” its owner, Kory has not real private life and he is always worried that no one discovers who is really behind the website. So when he has the chance to sell the website to another company following it as a consultant, it’s a perfect solution.

Zac Djorvzac is the owner of a travel agency and he has three rules: No Drama, No Dancing, No Dating. For the owner of a gay travel agency this is like a contradiction in terms, since you can’t have a group of gay men together and not having at least one of the Ds above. When Kory enters Zac’s office with a business proposal Zac never sent to him, Zac thinks the man is another city boy interesting only in partying and “loving”. And it not helps to make him changing his idea that Kory has an impromptu sex session with him on the floor behind the desk.

From a start like this, you would expect for the book to be a sex scene after the other. And this is something that actually I have never found in a Scott&Scott’s novel. Yes, there is sex, and also good sex, but the most important thing is the romance. These partners in work and life write novels that proof to the everyday gay man that also him is allowed to have romance. Since he is also a man, the romance is maybe a bit easier and less flowerily, but it’s not less romantic. Kory believes in true love, it’s the basic rule of his online dating website, but he is also a man who walks around with a condom in the pocket, just in case. Zac is apparently a stoic man, but in the end, he has a behind the should past as party boy.

If the light story and the funny moments weren’t enough to make me like this novel, the multiple references to “Dirty Dancing” and Patrick Swayze as must to seen movie for every respectable gay man and teen girls won me over. The roles between Kory and Zac change abruptly and when they leave for a vacation together to Baytown Beach with Kory’s friends and Zac’s employees (like a school trip among different classes where the main purpose is to gossip and dating), Kory becomes the library/laptop mouse, who hardly leaves his room, and Zac is now the beach boy who knows all the better places and who tries to drag Kory’s out of his shell. The dance lessons in the water or balancing on a rock, remind me too much Dirty Dancing to not love the story.

As I said this is a light story. It’s also maybe a little unrealistic, I can’t really believe that a group of grown men can go back so much to their teen years to consider a beach ball contest the main event of their vacation, but still, the story was nice and romantic, pretty much like a young comedy movie, that type of story that you read to rest and relax.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1928662161/?tag=elimyrevandra-20

A gay Catholic engages with his native church. I am not Irish, as Pomfret is, but am gay (well, reasonably cheerful most of the time) and was Catholic (how awful that was); I suspected this would be a fun read. It was, though not only humor gets used to make his points. I mean, you get some great lines:

Brokenness is an opportunity for the spirit to enter.
–and–
Sin is a failure to love when you have the capacity to do so.
–and–
We come because we experience something of God at the Shrine, something that moves, a whisper, a current, in a setting that both rings true and is strangely unsettling, decidedly different, where listening is active if imperfect and where acts of corporal mercy always form part of the picture.

It was a pleasure to read a memoir about being Catholic and gay that wasn't a big ol' wad of misery. This was a book about Author Pomfret's relationship to one of the pillars of his identity as a man and a religious being. It wasn't, however, just a single book; it was a series of stand-up routines written by an out gay Irish Catholic Securities and Exchange Commission bureaucrat with an atheist boyfriend, on a self-assigned mission to save the Church from sinking into moral turpitude (too late!) under Bennie the Rat (Pope Benedict XVI, né Joseph Ratzinger) on the issue of gay marriage. Although the people have changed, notably Bennie the Rat who became the only pope in history to retire instead of die in harness who wasn't an Anti-Pope or under threat of death, the fight for liberalization in the church has not.

Fun, however, was definitely had. Straight people will get as many, if not more, chuckles out of this than will gay guys. The recurring trope Mr. Pomfret uses to describe himself (a colleague at the SEC put his photo in a lineup with the 20th century's ickiest serial killers, and asked people which person in the lineup looked like a lawyer; Pomfret, a lawyer, wasn't selected once) is funny the first few times, but loses punch quickly; likewise his cute nicknames for the people in his quest-story for Catholic gay marriage support. (Note: I read a Kindle edition of this book; for no obvious reason, there is no longer a Kindle edition available...?)

Read this book. It's good, but one SHOULD read it a chapter at a time between other books the way a careful reader does some themed anthologies of poems or stories (eg, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart or Fight Like a Girl. Otherwise, it's like eating carrot cake as your vegetable.

At my blog here: http://www.bostonbibliophile.com/2008/12/review-since-my-last-confession-by.html

Nothing Personal by real life couple Scott&Scott is more a mainstream novel than a romance. Actually the romance in it is a bit overshadowed by the life journey of one of the character, the Cuban-American Carlo Batista.

At the beginning of the novel, Carlo is a mid-twenty normal gay guy; like a lot average guys, he went to college and gain a white collar job in an insurance call center. He has friends and ex lovers, and he follows the floods; one of this flood brings him in front of the building where politicians are voting a ban against gay marriage... and they win. Carlo, maybe for the first time, realizes that politics can influence his life and not in the best way. An attempt to change things without being too much involved doesn't bring much and so Carlo decides to enter the ring: he opposes to the Democrats candidate to be the him the Democrat representative.

Carlo is not a political animal, he is mostly a man throws in something bigger than him; gathering around him a disparate election committee, made up from friends and not with different minds but whose personal interests draw them together, Carlo begins to convince people that he is serious, when he himself is not sure of it. Meanwhile his relationship with Brian Gallagher, his new boyfriend, is getting serious too, even if Carlo doesn't know a lot about Gallagher, and Gallagher at once is supportive of his political campaign and soon after refuses to be too much involved.

Carlo and Gallagher's relationship is strange, since it starts abruptly, so abruptly that the reader realizes that they have a sexual relationship from little hints and not since he had the chance to read something about it; there is a scene in which Carlo is thinking to call Gallagher to ask the guy out, and few pages after, Carlo and Gallagher are steadily dating, and probably something is happening between them... I was a bit disoriented, I even went back some pages to actually check if I missed to read something... Maybe the fact is that the focus of the novel is not the romance between Carlo and Gallagher, but more Carlo's growth as independent man. And to be independent, Carlo couldn't focus on Gallagher.

While we know about everything about Carlo, we know very little about Gallagher. He remains a mystery almost till the end, not only about his life, but also about his feelings for Carlo. Gallagher is strange, since he made things that are very tender, like bringing Carlo to know his family, but then he never gives any details on his life and feeling. Despite this, speaking of the romance, I prefer Gallagher's character, I feel like he is more involved on a personal level than Carlo. I really feel like if Carlo is a man who follows the flood, both in politics than love, but maybe this is due to the fact that he is still so young.

Anyway the book is a bit of a surprise, quite different from the others I read by the same authors, but not a negative ones; only be warned, to be not disappointed from the lack of heavy romance aspects, usually so frequent in the Romentics novels.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1419620797/?tag=elimyrevandra-20

Reviewed by Marie at the Boston Bibliophile