Book Discussion Group is Every 4th Saturday of the Month, 11:00 am

No RVSP Needed, just show up or join on (Meeting ID: 275 139 4844 and Pass code: 076609)

This month’s selection: “Tramps Like Us” by Joe Westmoreland

The novel is a modern-day Huckleberry Finn. It’s an all-American story about the search for home, for a better life, and feeling like a refugee in one’s own country. It’s about creating a family from a group of misfits. It tells what it was like to come of age in the era between gay liberation and the beginning of the AIDS crisis.

Abused by his father and stifled by a closeted life as a teenager in Kansas City, Joe, the wide-eyed narrator of Tramps Like Us, graduates from high school in 1974 and hits the road hitchhiking. But it isn’t until he reunites with Ali, his hometown’s other queer outcast, that Joe finds a partner in crime. When the two of them finally wash up in New Orleans, they discover a hedonistic paradise of sex, drugs, and music—a world that only expands when they move to San Francisco in 1979.

Told with openhearted frankness, the book is an exuberantly soulful adventure of self-discovery and belonging, set across a consequential American decade. In New Orleans and San Francisco, and on the roads in between, Joe and Ali find communities of misfits to call their own. The days and nights blur, a blend of LSD and heroin, new wave and disco, orgies and friends, and the thrilling spontaneity of youth—all of which is threatened the moment Joe, Ali, and seemingly everyone around them are diagnosed with HIV. But miraculously, the stories survive.

Back in print after two decades, the book is an ode to an early lost generation—an autofictional chronicle of America between gay liberation and the AIDS crisis—and an evergreen testament to the force of friendship.