Got 'til it's gone

Larry Duplechan

When we first met Johnnie Ray in the novel Blackbird, he was a gay teenager in love with the star of a high school play; now he's forty-eight, still handsome and gym-built, but admittedly vain and looking down the short road to fifty. In the midst of a midlife crisis, he falls for a much younger man with some serious Daddy issues; throughout it all, Johnnie Ray tries to look at love (and his life) from both sides now (to borrow a phrase from his idol Joni Mitchell).