OpenRoadMedia

Boston Boys Club is my love letter to my adopted home. The book is also what I like to call a guy’s Sex and the City. I wrote this book to showcase all my favorite places in Boston but also to provide a mirror to the struggles and successes of young gay professionals as they try to find themselves, personally and professionally. Through alternating chapters, Cuban-American journalist Tommy Perez, his studly, Italian wingman, Rico DiMio, and reality TV model Kyle Andrews tell their own stories as newcomers in this provincial and staid town. Although the book has a light-hearted feel, the novel delves into serious universal themes. There’s the addictive pull of alcoholism and its damaging effects on a sober partner, the burdens of college debt, finding and resisting love, and coping with a life-threatening diagnosis. I also wanted to present a fully realized gay Cuban character—a rarity in popular fiction. I gave Tommy some unusual but comical quirks such as his love for Diet Coke and his penchant for routines because of his mild obsessive compulsive order.

One wintry New England Friday night, I wrote about something I knew, something that provided much inspiration in Boston as well as Miami—being single and looking for that special someone despite being disappointed in love. Looking for a creative outlet from my news articles in the Boston Globe, I sat down and began writing about a fictional night out with three different guys at Club Café, a local gay bar. I took on the voice of one of the guys. The words just came to me, flowing onto the screen. I wrote it for me, as a fun creative exercise, not thinking this could be something more.

When I was done, I filed the 3,000-word story away. But as the weekend passed and I began my work week again, the story kept calling me. I felt I could continue, telling the story from the point of view of one of the other guys. Later that week, I plopped myself in front of the computer again and I channeled that other character, how he would see the night. The words sprung onto the screen and the scenes came to life. Inspired, I followed up with another story from the point of a view of the third character. After three stories, it hit me: These stories are chapters. This could be a book.

I began molding the characters. I told myself that if I could keep a steady pace, of a chapter a week of about 2,000 words, I could get somewhere. But instead of focusing on a deadline, I wrote from my heart. It was a fun experience, an exercise in channeling each different character. I imagined how they would speak and react to similar situations that my friends and I have shared in our daily struggles with love and family.

And what began as a short story evolved into Boston Boys Club, a contemporary look at what it’s like being young, single, and gay in a city that is a revolving door of newcomers and seasonal college imports.

About the Title:

Before I began writing the first chapter, which at its core began as a short story, I had the Boston Boys Club title in mind. The name came to me because it can represent a physical place, as in Club Café where the three guys meet up each week, yet the title can also refer to a clique, an inner circle of friends. So the title works in two ways.

Flanked by gorgeous brick row houses in the heart of Boston’s South End, the Club Café is a bar where everybody knows your name—and who you slept with last. Every night men like Tommy Perez, Rico DiMio, and Kyle Andrews take their places among the glistening crowd sporting chest-defining shirts and lots of smooth, tanned skin, sizing up the regulars and the new blood while TV monitors blare Beyoncé and Missy Elliott.

For Tommy, Thursdays at the Club Café in the company of his wingman, Rico, and a Skinny Black Bitch (vodka and Diet Coke) are unmissable. Recently relocated from Miami to Boston to take a reporting job at The Boston Daily, Tommy is finding it hard to break away from his tight-knit Cuban family, but his homesickness goes into rapid remission when he meets Mikey, a blue-eyed, boyish guidance counselor from Cape Cod. Smart, funny, and wicked cute, Mikey is perfect boyfriend material…until his drinking leads Tommy to suspect that he’s got some issues of his own. Rico—a tough-talking Italian-American accountant with a gammaray smile and mournful green eyes that hint at a past he’ll admit to no one—is sure Mikey is bad news, but to Rico any relationship that lasts longer than three hours sounds like bad news. Then there’s Kyle, the lean, preening model and former reality show star who makes a red-carpet entrance into the CC every Thursday as if a swarm of cameras still follows his every move, but whose real life is about to take a dramatic turn he never anticipated.

Over the course of one unforgettable year, Tommy is forced to rethink everything he’s ever believed about life, lust, and love. And in the Club Café, a place filled with endless possibilities—of stumbling upon the perfect partner, the perfect story idea, or just a play buddy for the night—Tommy might finally discover the person he was meant to be.

Boston Boys Club is racy, funny, and smart. With his unforgettable trio of narrators, Johnny Diaz ushers the reader through the sex-filled, weirdly skewed world of contemporary gay Boston. You're going to love this book. -- Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin and We Disappear

Johnny Diaz brings to palpable life the ins, out, ups and downs of gay city life and its most dangerous pastime: dating. In chronicling the love lives - or lack thereof - of three good friends who meet weekly at the local watering hole, Johnny Diaz gives us situations, hopes, fears, and especially characters that all readers will identify with, and may even recognize as themselves. At turns comic, touching, and tragic, Boston Boys Club is sure to serve as a testament of American gay life in the new millennium, and the timeless search for Mister Right - or Mister Right Now. An addictive read. -- J.G. Hayes, author of A Map of The Harbor Islands

One star. That’s what Miami movie critic Ray Martinez would give the local dating scene. He wants to meet a guy to take home to his Cuban parents but his lack luster love life isn’t living up to his Hollywood romantic fantasies. After a week of screening the biggest blockbusters, Ray looks forward to meeting up with his friends - local TV reporter Ted Williams and singer Brian Anderson - every Friday night at Score, South Beach’s most popular watering hole for gay men.

As Ray searches for that special guy, he’s often ribbed by his identical twin brother Racso, who is the apple of their parent’s eyes. A Miami high school English teacher, Racso is everything Ray is not: straight, masculine and engaged to a fellow teacher whom his parents embrace as the daughter they’ve never had.

The book centers mostly on Ray and Racso’s humorous sibling rivalry. But the novel also examines the enduring friendship between Ray, Ted and Brian, whom are also facing some dating issues of their own. Over the course of year, Ray, Ted and Brian lean on each other as they struggle with relationships and family issues. The book examines the challenges of dating in a Latin metropolis like Miami where most residents are beautiful and sculpted.