The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

Concourse
BY Santino Hassell
Riptide Publishing, 2017
Four stars

I continue to really like the “Five Boroughs” series by Santino Hassell. I found “Concourse” exhilarating and frustrating by turns, which I think is intentional. Hassell is an excellent writer; vivid and even romantic but never sloppy or verbose. I love the way Hassell continues to weave this big tapestry of New York City, some of which feels quite accurate, but all of which is ultimately a smartly stylized fantasy of queer life across this sprawling, multicultural megalopolis. I live in New Jersey; I can see Manhattan from my back yard, but I can only see Santino’s New York in my mind. I keep thinking of that television series I was too young to watch in the late 1950s: “Naked City.” The narrator always intoned at the end: “There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them.” In “Concourse,” Valdrin Leka and Ashton Townsend show us two more of those stories.

Val Leka is the rough-and-tumble son of Albanian immigrants. He is training to be a boxer because his father—before he disappeared—spurred his love for the sport. He is a straight-shooter, a young man of honor who, literally and figuratively, fights for the people he loves. Sexually, Valdrin is a question mark. Neither drawn to women or men particularly, he says at one point: “Truthfully, I don’t know what I am.” In Hassell’s quest to explore sexuality through his wide cast of characters, he now offers us the idea of the demisexual: someone sexually awakened by only specific individuals rather than a type. Valdrin is sort of a virtuous knight in shining armor, but finds his armor a kind of prison.

Now, Ashton is something else again. Androgynous and startlingly beautiful, Ashton is adamantly gay, but he presents himself as sexually vague, with his long blond hair and feminized designer clothing. Ash is all about presentation, and he keeps his inner self carefully off-screen, even as his public persona is followed by millions on Instagram and Facebook. I really loved Ashton, because he represents the kind of dramatic gay man I guess I always dreamed about being, without ever coming close to being. Ashton is highly sexual and revels in his proud embrace of gay sexuality. in short (as one gay teenager says): “…sort of a hot mess. But…like, the hot mess that everyone wants to be.” Sometimes irresponsible, Ashton is the damsel in distress to Val’s valiant knight. But this is a smokescreen; Hassell’s story is deeper and more complicated than that.

And that’s why it’s so compelling.

Val and Ash have known each other since they were children, when Val’s father disappeared and his mother went to work as a nanny for the rich, socially powerful Townsend family. Ash was the strange, sissy youngest son, and he clung desperately to Mrs. Leka and her children Valdrin and Hana. They became his emotional family. Val became his best friend.

Now, Valdrin boxes in the Bronx for no pay to fulfill the dreams of others while Ashton gets paid to go to parties in Tribeca to fuel other people’s fantasies of sex and glamour. However, it is their relationship with each other that stands alone. This is the puzzle that they must figure out in “Concourse.”

There were definitely moments in this book that I wanted to grab both men by the shoulders and shake them. Shut up and talk! Yes, Hassell definitely uses a level of human mental density that I find hard to fathom as a tool to churn up the reader’s emotions. I suspect in real life both Val and Ash would have figured things out before they turned twenty-four. But, this is the world of romance, even Hassell’s gritty urban romance, and nothing can be as simple as we might like. A lot of the fun in reading these books is fretting about how the author is going to get us where we want to be. I confess, there is one moment during the heaviest sturm und drang that I got angry—only to have the author surprise me in a page or so and quell my irritation. I love being manipulated with such skill.

There are a few characters who flicker in from the other “Five Bouroughs” novels, most notably Meredith Stone, whose brother Caleb figures largely in “First and First.” Meredith is the representative of Ashton’s world—money and power and endless partying. Luis Ramos is her counterpoint in Valdrin’s world: a young Dominican boxer who represents everything that is tough and blue-collar in the Bronx—but who in the end surprises us with a kind of low-key good-heartedness. But the real role of these secondary characters is to remind us that these two men are part of a big picture, in a vast city where queerness takes on many shapes, and offers us many stories woven in different colors with a common thread.