*Ron by Carl Tiktin (Arbor House, 1979)

 

Ron Starr (nee Stansky -- his Jewish father changed the name for "professional" reasons) grows up in a sort of fake Leave-It-To-Beaver home in upstate New York in the 1950s.  His father is an ineffectual and defeated lawyer, his mother is a pretentious hysteric, and both and his older brother, Lenny, are homosexual.

Lenny, who is dark and semitic, is less able, or interested, in hiding his sexuality and is banished from the family when he's discovered having sex with his high school friend.  Ron, a golden boy, learning the value of discretion, keeps his queerness hidden.  In college he discovers an interest and ability in playwrighting and moves to New York City, where he falls in with a bohemian theater crowd.  But his play gets worse and worse the more he rewrites it, and he finally gives up on his dream of Broadway fame and fortune.  He begins selling life insurance, which, thanks to his confidence and charm, he excels at, and is soon managing a team of salesmen, married to a secretary, and the father of a daughter.

But of course his homosexual urges persist and he soon sets up a young lover in a Greenwich Village apartment where he spends about half his time.  He begins drinking and misbehaving in various ways that threaten his career and his marriage, but when he is offered a promotion to management he cannot resist the lures and comforts of a straight life and renounces. his true nature.

Ron is crudely conceived and written but does afford an interesting and entertaining, if skewed, look at midcentury queer life in middle America.