Old gay couples

"Here are two well-dressed young men sharing an umbrella.

Flipping through the book, it wasn’t that I felt that I learned a great deal about being LGBTQ, but what gave me comfort was the feeling that we’re not going anywhere. But Gambone’s thrust is the present. He’s a skilled storyteller, holding back enough to keep his reader continually engaged, but character is his thing: the people and narrators who populate Zigzag’s 16 stories are complex, relatable, and very much themselves, whether they’re humorous, irritating, or lovable, or a combination of the three.

For example, there’s Mason Chastain in “The Hazardous Life,” a high-school French teacher nearing retirement who embarks on teaching a senior-level French literature course and falls for one of his most promising male students.

These fictional boomers are both proving and disproving the cliché that “old age isn’t for sissies.”

Gambone is an extraordinarily good writer, though his work has usually been relegated to the queer lit sections of bookstores and websites because of his subjects. Now retired, he spent his life teaching high-school English and college-level writing in the Boston area.

In one, two men hold up a sign that says “Not married but willing to be.” In another, a shirtless man gives another man a piggyback ride. “There are: boyfriends on bicycles, boyfriends in boats, boyfriends on cars, boyfriends on a paper moon, boyfriends in trees, beach boyfriends, bathing suit boyfriends, umbrella boyfriends, boyfriends kissing, boyfriends on a bed, boyfriends' splendor in the grass, photo-booth boyfriends, double hand-hold boyfriends, single hand-hold boyfriends, wrap-around embrace boyfriends, and many more.”

But they said that if the viewer “goes deeper into these categories, they arrive at identical, intricate embraces, without any way of having seen an example to copy.” The creators revealed that these similarities span geography and time.

The effect is interesting but not climactic. But what’s erotic in the book is not gratuitous, and Gambone is never vulgar in spirit. “They couldn’t have known about each other. While the majority of the images hail from the United States and are of predominantly white men, there are images from Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Japan, Latvia, and the United Kingdom among the cache.

What do images of men in love during a time when it was illegal tell us?

Then there’s the HR counselor Alan, in “Human Resources,” who lives in a bungalow in Mattapan with another single gay roommate in his 60s. Loving is available in five languages: French, English, Italian, German and Spanish.

Nini and Treadwell hope that the new exhibition—and shows like it in the future—will continue to spread the message that “love is love,” as Treadwell tells the Art Newspaper’s Karen Chernick.

“Love has been around forever,” he adds.

“Loving” is on view at the Musée Rath in Geneva, Switzerland, through September 24.

Hundreds of photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries offer a glimpse at the life of gay men during a time when their love was illegal almost everywhere.

A beautiful group of photographs that spans a century (1850–1950) is part of a new book that offers a visual glimpse of what life may have been like for those men, who went against the law to find love in one another’s arms.

Seeing ourselves in the past is as much about being certain of our present and, dare I say, our future. Their [love] so similarly expressive—could only have emerged from their common humanity,” said the creators.

The captivating gazes and embracing poses reveal a world entirely different from the one we live in today.

“Zigzag,” the titular final story, corrals characters from several other stories in the book into an art gallery opening reception in Dorchester. There’s also the letter carrier Sam and his younger husband, Daryl, in “Big Boy,” who encounter a wealthy couple, Monroe and Richard, as they walk through the South End. Sam and Daryl have an open relationship within certain boundaries, which these new friends end up challenging.

It was that the expression of love between these men that spanned different decades, centuries, and countries turned out to be almost identical. One is placing a wedding ring on the other’s finger."