Everyone inhabits territory with boundaries, whether consciously or not. How many people are aware on a minute-by-minute basis that they are, for example, white, German-American, right-handed, middle aged, etc.? Substitute your own parameters, then regard the substance of your life and assess how much of it you live consciously and how much simply slips past you in the course of events. In this most recent novel, Raymond Luczak again mines his experience as a man with his feet firmly and consciously planted in two very specific worlds: the world of the deaf and that of the gay. He spans the period from 1978 to the present with a progressive cast of characters who inhabit those worlds with him, whether they accept their places or not, and shows us how events within the larger hearing gay community affected and continue to affect events in the much more restricted deaf gay community by taking us on journeys within that smaller group. We see how the men and women of the group manage their day-to-day lives, how they find love – or don't, how they cope with joy and disappointment, illness and health, poverty and isolation, comfort and fellowship. Some of this material will seem familiar to readers of his recent Assembly Required, reviewed here in the August, 2009 issue [see archives], but most of this new work is fresh on the map, and his writing is just as strong in this as in the earlier book, his eye for the telling detail just as precise. This is a history told with clear eyes and a hopeful heart.

Men With Their Hands, a novel
Raymond Luczak
Queermojo/Rebel Satori Press, Bar Harbor, ME; 2009
258 pp.
ISBN 978-1-60864-024-9
$16.95

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