Product Description

Moe Pearlman is famous throughout New York City for his superior oral sex skills. But in the late 1990s, Moe—a neurotic, twenty something writer—finds his favorite hobby under attack. A conservative mayor is closing down bathhouses, sex clubs, and adult theaters—and he’s doing it with the secret cooperation of Frank DeSoto, publisher of the only gay newspaper in town, a middle-aged man who made his fortune off gay men’s lust for sex and drugs but who, after losing his lover to AIDS, has become a moral crusader against such behaviors. As the sex crackdown escalates, Moe joins a group of activists trying to fight City Hall, but when the fight gets serious, the group buckles, leaving Moe on a one-man mission. It’s a losing effort until Moe gets the chance to challenge Frank DeSoto head-on. The tensions between Moe and Frank boil over into a full-scale battle—and, eventually, a personal tug-of-war—between two people with opposing ideas of what it means to be a gay man in the age of AIDS.

"Hard is smart, fast-paced, raunchy, and funny, a sexy comic strip of a novel about the way gay men live now. It's Larry Kramer's novel Faggots twenty-five years later, but nimbler, more accurate, more generous, and much, much wiser." —Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters

"Wayne Hoffman's Hard is as sexy and masculine and contemporary as its title." —Edmund White, author of The Farewell Symphony

"Hard is a quick-paced debut that neatly straddles the fence between politics and porn. With Hoffman as our knowledgeable guide, this novel takes the reader on a tour of the intertwined lives of several gay men in contemporary New York. By turns erotic and vulnerable, playful and deadly serious, Hard is refreshingly easy to like." —Aaron Hamburger, author of Faith for Beginners and The View from Stalin's Head

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #702923 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 345 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Sexual politics—both public and private—play out against the cityscape of mid-1990s Manhattan in Hoffman's absorbing year-in-the-life of a group of gay men. Amid a citywide crackdown on public sex venues, the editors of two gay newspapers take opposing sides. One editor, Moe Pearlman—the 26-year-old grad-school dropout at the heart of the novel—is a founding member of the Alliance to Save Sex (get it?) who participates in civil disobedience more Candace Bushnell than Thoreau: with promiscuous oral sex, he "tak[es] a stand on his knees." The other editor, Frank DeSoto, remembers the AIDS epidemic of the '80s—when he lost his lover— and sees the crackdown as a matter of public health. Humanizing the story are the characters occupying the space between: aspiring photographer Kevin, who makes ends meet turning an occasional trick, endangering both himself and his lover, Aaron; and Gene, who must learn to give up his only fetish—control—when he's diagnosed with HIV. Though shallow characters initially stunt the narrative, the larger issues of sexual rights and AIDS add depth to their voices, making this sexually explicit debut novel an intriguing exploration of politics and psyche. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
A writer and editor for more than fifteen years, Wayne Hoffman is managing editor of the Forward, America’s national Jewish newspaper. Previously, he was senior editor at Billboard and a founding editor of the New York Blade, the largest gay newspaper in the country. His cultural reporting has appeared in the Washington Post, the Village Voice, The Nation, The Advocate, the Boston Phoenix, and the Chicago Sun-Times. He lives in New York.

Customer Reviews

Read this book, and then tell a friend about it!
This extraordinary novel arrived on the scene with too little fanfare, and although it comes from a mainstream publisher, it was (and is) relegated to the "Gay fiction" section at Barnes and Noble, wedged in between the beach reads.

"Hard" could be a beach read, it's funny and sexy enough for that. And it lacks the Violet Quill stylistic pretensions of an earlier generation of gay novelists.

But Hoffman's first novel is so much more. Let me backtrack a second and say that I almost never read fiction anymore, especially not gay fiction. One more tortured coming out story and I will explode.

But this novel had me from the first page, and I read it one night. I couldn't put it down until I had finished it, and it must have been 3 or 4 in the morning by then.

While the book is often laugh-out-loud funny, it deals with serious and important themes that are not talked about in our community -- at least not in a productive way. Perhaps a novel was the only way to address them.

I urge you to read this book. Hoffman has captured his generation in these pages.

Strange Bedfellows


STRANGE BEDFELLOWS--
"HARD" by Wayne Hoffman

AMOS LASSEN and Literary Pride

Hoffman, Wayne. "Hard". Carroll and Graf, 2006

Every so often a gay novel comes along that knocks you almost mute. When I closed the covers of "Hard" by Wayne Hoffman, I felt like I had just ended a close friendship. The novel is described as " an exploration of a world where sex is a matter of life and death and politics make the strangest bedfellows". That sentence should be enough to make you want to spend a couple of days or more reading it. The book is fresh and very "today". It is sexy, to an understatement and it is all man. (That doesn't mean that ladies won't like it but it is hard hitting and really knocks the reader out).
Our protagonist is Moe Pearlman, a man famed for his ability to give the finest head in New York City (that is some reputation). When he finds that his sex life is in danger because the mayor has decided to close all of the bath houses, sex clubs and adult theaters, he realizes that he must act. To make things even more mysterious, the mayor is doing so with the cooperation of Frank, the publisher of the only gay newspaper in town. Frank, who was once the purveyor of open sex, made his fortune because of it. Suddenly he changes his tune when his longtime partner dies because of AIDS. He takes on the role of the crusading knight for moral correctness and finds himself at odds with Moe. Frank's actions cause the rise of a gay community which is a microcosm of society at large. As the community emerges, it does so without reference to age, gender or any of the other factors that tend to polarize us. This community brings to the fore all the major issues which face gays in America today--HIV and AIDS, racism, feminism, sex, politics and class as well as the generation gap. Hoffman, in turn, peers into the group and derives the effect that personal experience has on politics and thereby influences identification--with oneself and with others. This in itself is no easy feat. And Hoffman, at times, takes a psychological approach to his characters by delving into their minds and innermost thoughts by exploring their motivation and the catalysts in their lives some 25 years into the most serious crisis ever to affect our lives, the AIDS epidemic.
Here s a look at the New York gay scene that was darefully and carefully written about by Andrew Holleran and Larry Kramer. But this is also a look at the same scene AAA (After the advent of AIDS). It is not a pretty scene; it is disturbing to say the least. This is something we should know about and Hoffman is our narrator. Here is the story of how we live today, how AIDS and bigotry has taken its toll on us. From the back rooms of gay bars to the news rooms of the media, from free unabandoned sexual escapades to the offices of City Hall this is the story of sex not being just sex but a matter of "life or death" and how politicians attempt to control our lives. I am not sure that some of this book is not as close to porn as a book can get or whether it is a political treatise. It is one hand very very serious, on the other hand it is racy and wild. Above everything else, it is highly erotic.
Wayne Hoffman delivers his story in clear, crisp prose. This together with a swift moving plot and the author's mastery as a story teller is a book not to be missed by any member of any gay community. It is a must read--it is the story of who we are, who we were and who we will be. "Hard" is our story and we need to embrace it.
_________________
Amos Lassen
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Sexy, thought-provoking, and fun!
It's the rare gay-themed novel that trusts its readers to be educated grown-ups, and I'm happy to report that Wayne Hoffman's Hard is part of that small club. This zippy read could ostensibly be dismissed as another potboiler in the tradition of Tales of the City, but it has a subversive undercurrent that elevates it to another level. The likeable characters span the spectrum of comfort with their sexuality, from Moe, "the sweetest mouth in New York," to Frank, the repressed (and repressive) newspaper publisher. As they butt heads over what behavior is acceptable in the age of HIV, the dialogue veritably crackles, and I was swept up by the author's passion on the subject. Whether or not you have an opinion on the government's regulation of gay sex (and hopefully you do), you'll find this a great read. Gay life in late-90s NYC is evoked perfectly, and the sex scenes (of which there are many) are refreshingly trashy. Is it possible to end a review of this book without resorting to the cheap pun, get Hard? I guess not....