Our Evening by Allan Hollinghurst

This author is a masterful story teller. This is the story of Dave Win, a gay man of color, as he tells it in late middle age, recreating a sequence of formative or quietly significant episodes across six decades, from the 1960s to the COVID pandemic. When he is a boy at school, discovering the possibilities of music and drama, finding his own powers, shaken by encounters with prejudice and aggression, filled with unspoken ecstasies as his sensual attraction to men grows. Then he is a young actor with a subversive touring company in the 1970s; he is a lover, finding joy with his partners. He is also an only son to a single mother who knows that he is gay from the beginning and supports and loves him, their closeness outlasting all change. Dave is a gay man of a generation reaching maturity soon after decriminalization, seizing his freedoms wholeheartedly amid intolerance. He is also half Burmese, though he never met the father from whom he inherited his Asian looks, and all the racial intolerance that entails. The novel tracks the currents of gay liberation and race relations, not to mention a modern history of theatre and the arts throughout the period, and it is told unflinchingly and without rancor. Another great sweeping novel by a talented and openly gay author.