Fiction. You know that feeling you get when you're reading a book and stubbornly wishing that the characters were gay even though you know you're only going to be disappointed? I really didn't have that problem here. Everyone in it is gay: the insecure cop working vice, the Kid putting on a burlesque act at Thriller Jill's, the golden best friends who wrestle on the floor. Gay gay gay.The story tears through almost fifty years of gay life, from 1949 to 1991, bouncing back and forth between Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minnesota, New York City, and New Hampshire. The book itself takes nearly that long to read. The hardback is 600 pages long and skips wildly through the years, collecting more characters than an Agatha Christie novel, more sex and death, too, but no handy character guide in the front. You can't start this book and then put it down for two weeks before picking it up again because you won't remember who Johnna is and if you're supposed to recognize Desmond or what the difference between Jim and Henry was. It needs to be read quickly because all these characters run into each other at some point in their lives, all tied together by ex-lovers or old jobs and new cities.It's an experimental narrative that flits between characters, perspectives, and even tenses. There are internal monologues in a variety of POVs, the speakers sometimes impossible to discern, and a mysterious first person narrator that pops up from time to time to provide knowing commentary in an ironic, omniscient voice, sounding like nothing so much as Kilgore Trout or possibly Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. himself.Normally I wouldn't put up with that kind of crazy trickery from a book, but, like Vonnegut, Mordden makes it necessary. It's jarring, but masterful. You feel like he has a reason for it, a reason good enough to excuse it, explain it. The book sucks you in and by the time the narrative weirdness becomes a fixture, you're sunk because the characters, all six billion of them, are engaging, flawed, hungry, and confused. You keep reading because you want to know what happens to them.The book has a teasing tone, a huge vocabulary, a romantic soul, a hopeless nature, a relentless drive into the future. It's all about the clock of history ticking away. It starts in a time before there's even such a thing as "gay." It creates gay and then moves on to police busts, falling in love with your best friend in a small town, Stonewall, dance halls, gay porn, AIDS. Its final chapter is set in New York in 1991 during Pride week, a series of vignettes filled with characters we know and people we've never met before. For every relationship it breaks up, it builds two new ones. It's a huge novel with a sense of epic exhaustion and strained hope, and it's an amazing trip.