Name: How Long Has This Been Going On
ISBN: 9780312168674

Ethan Mordden

A novel of gay and lesbian life from the 1940s to the present introduces three gay high school jocks and their female best friend, and places them against the backdrop of important dates in gay history

How Long Has This Been Going On

Sarah Sammis

What Lassie? Timmy's trapped down the well and he's gay? That's what it felt like to read How Long Has This Been Going On? It is supposedly a well written epic of modern American gay history and it certainly has high reviews on Amazon.com but I found it annoying at worst and laughable at best.

The book covers from the end of World War Two through the mid 1990s. A lot happened in that time but I spent so much time rolling my eyes at the characters that I couldn't take the important parts seriously. The story is told in two main ways: in the form of dialogue between a naive character and a his (or her) older lover who has to stop and explain everything.

The second way the story is told is through the overly chatty omniscient narrator. I wanted to slap some duct tape on the narrator's mouth to get him to shut up long enough for the story to actually get somewhere. Some authors can pull off this sort of chit-chat approach to story telling (Christopher Moore and Armistad Maupin for example): Mordden can't. My four-year-old is better at telling this style of story, for goodness sakes!

How Long Has This Been Going On

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