"THE BOYS IN THE BROWNSTONE"
by Kevin Scott
(Haworth Press/Harrington Park Press)
In his first novel, THE BOYS IN THE BROWNSTONE, screenwriter and playwright Kevin Scott writes a hilarious comedy of manners about a group of gay men who don’t fit in anywhere except a bar they call home.
A “gentleman’s bar” on the affluent Upper East Side of New York, the Brownstone is a quaint oasis of Chippendale and Sondheim in a city of gym rats and club kids. But the boys in the brownstone aren’t gentlemen and they certainly aren’t quaint.
Scott's wild parade of characters includes a museum curator who can’t resist a handsome young pianist whose previous boyfriends have all committed suicide; an assistant pastor who steals from a dying monsignor to finance his lover’s landscape gardening business; an African American blue blood who tires of the “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” policy his well-bred parents try to enforce; and a soon-to-be-married soap opera writer who panics when his sanctimonious father defies his congregation to perform the gay wedding at his own church. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere these characters can just be themselves -- except at the Brownstone.
Scott’s movie, "Key Exchange," was called “a film with wit, candor and sweetness” by The New York Times, and his play, "Hide Your Love Away," was called “shrewdly relevant and briskly entertaining” by Newsday and “highly entertaining” by The New York Post.
The Boys in the Brownstone is available at Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com and other webstores and bookstores.
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"If Gay Hollywood doesn't snatch up the film rights to this novel, I'll be convinced that the industry is as screwed-up as its straight counterpart."
---Hal Campbell, We the People
"The Boys in the Brownstone manages to be both deeply serious and funny at the same time. Characters teeter on the brink of self-destruction but are not pitiful -- they are human, recognisable and, while you're never sure a happy ending is on the way, you can laugh along with them while they live their complicated lives."
---Jarlath Gregory, Gay Community News, Dublin, Ireland
"Highly readable and compulsively page-turning, it's is a cross between Ethan Morden's "Buddies" cycle and an older-guy's version of "Queer As Folk." Set in a piano bar on New York's Upper East Side, Scott chronicles the lives, loves, fortunes, and misfortunes of a group of diverse men as they rush or stumble through city life to find not just happiness, but a sense of community and security…The Boys in the Brownstone feels delightfully old-fashioned and comforting."
---Michael Bronski, Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility
“The author has certainly mastered his craft. A masterful command of multiple characters and story lines — as well as a gift for vivid, sassy dialogue — is on display.”
---Philadelphia Gay News
“The Boys in the Brownstone” is a potent reminder that anything approaching a kind of truth is best apprehended through fine literature and fiction. This remarkable, thought-provoking novel combines the pioneering story-telling methods of Ford Maddox Ford, Laurence Durrell, and Robert Altman to emphasize that life is prismatic and multi-layered."
-–David Kaufman, "Ridiculous: The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlum"
"A LAUGH-OUT-LOUD COMEDY OF MANNERS. . . . The author has a remarkable, uncanny range, orchestrating the work from a vast array of viewpoints... Best of all, he mines the comic gold of the dysfunctional American family. This novel is A GREAT READ, full of deadpan wisdom, madcap plot twists, and basic human truths."
—- Jenny Lyn Bader, co-author of "He Meant, She Meant: The Definitive Male-Female Dictionary"
"Kevin Scott joins distinguished company -- James and Wharton, Auchincloss and Hijuelos -- in his keen ability to chronicle life and manners in New York City. This Brownstone differs only in that it has possibly more closets, and their doors are thrown wide open. These 'boys,' whose lives overlap and intersect here, form a family as comforting and dysfunctional as any in literature or real life."
— Marion Abbott Bundy, co-author of "Talking Pictures"
“This is the kind of book that gets better and better as it goes along. The stories interweave, and the reader takes growing pleasure in the way the separate strands knit together and form a rich tapestry. It’s like a "Winesburg, Ohio" set in gay New York, except that the characters in Sherwood Anderson never transcend their isolation and marginality, and here they do: here they manage to come together into a community of shared identity. "The Boys in the Brownstone" is clear-eyed, tough, and at the same time funny and tender.”
--- Gilberto Perez, "The Material Ghost"