Bad Reputation

DOES SEATTLE GIVE A DAMN ABOUT HIS PAST REPUTATION? After being caught in a backseat tryst with the mayor’s son, twenty-one-year-old Shane Fontaine is exiled from his small hometown. Now, alone in the city, he seeks solace in punk show mosh pits and bathhouse saunas. But the music scene and gay community in 1982 recession-era Seattle aren’t always safe. Rescued from a brutal beating, Shane forms a friendship with a Russian engineering student that launches a confounding set of traumatic and ecstatic encounters. Shane’s quest for human connection sends him down dark, dangerous streets. To survive, he must become the man who chooses to persist, to do the right thing and stand up for others. This close-up portrait of pre-AIDS Seattle illuminates dark corners, where homeless kids cluster for safety near the revitalized Pike Place Market. Bad Reputation contrasts the deeply personal need for friendship with the universal dilemma: people aren’t always what they seem. The Queen City Boys books are a linked novel sequence that needs not be read in any particular order. Spanning four decades in Seattle, Queen City Boys tells the explicit adventures of an eclectic group of gay friends as they find their way through the ends and beginnings of their most important relationships.