Eric Gottlund, a gay bar pianist and narrator of Now, I’m Here (Beautiful Dreamer Press, $17.95. www.jimprovenzano.com), the achingly tender new novel by Lambda Literary Award–winner Jim Provenzano, describes Columbus, Ohio as “a city where every September farm boys in the form of college freshmen come to give away their beauty. We grow homosexuals here.”
Thirty years beyond his own rural youth, Eric observes the latest crop, full of rue and reminiscence: “When all the cute boys have moved on to the nearby dance club…T-shirts soon to cling to their lithe forms with the sweat of their dancing, they leave the fat lounge singer with his tip jar. Oh, don’t flatter me; I know I’m big as a house. It’s my protection for a broken heart.”
There’s a stately elegance to Provenzano’s prose: rich, distinctly literary locutions that evoke novels of the early 1990s in which the likes of Edmund White, Alan Barnett, and Andrew Holleran spun a golden floss of words that exalted even the most quotidian details of gay men’s lives. The effect then, and in Now You’re Here, was to confer dignity, value, and preciousness 
upon people who were overlooked or disdained by most of American society. The urban tribes chronicled in that earlier era’s most acclaimed gay novels have both evolved and staked a permanent claim in the national imagination.
But Provenzano reminds us of a swath of gay men and boys who remain largely overlooked; the small town, Midwestern gays whose psyches, like their turf, have been regarded as flyover country. As Provenzano traces the friendship and falling outs between Eric and his two closest friends through the 1970s and 1980s, we hear untold tales of sexual awakening among the decidedly un-“woke,” we see the long- nailed finger of HIV/AIDS scratching far beyond big cities, and we are reminded how limited our sense of “gay community” can sometimes be.
