"We have all the time in the world, my sweet beautiful man."

It was the ending that scared off even gay editors back in the day. The last chapter of playwright Richard Willett's controversial lost novel of the eighties is an intimate victory dance of overt gay male sexuality at a time when not just silence = death, but for many sex = death. Now, perhaps, readers will be more open to celebrating it.

It's 1986 in New York City and 27-year-old Eric Summerfield knows that "yuppies" are supposed to be obnoxious, easily dismissed, but he envies the clarity of their delusions, their seeming ability to keep mortality at bay. He yearns, in fact, to be one of them. The catch: He's no Wall Street insider, but instead the underpaid employee of a Canadian chain bookstore in Midtown Manhattan, a Canuck himself, and gay, and AIDS suddenly seems to be everywhere, including in the body of his flamboyant friend and coworker Dale, who inexplicably singles out a reluctant Eric to be his chief caregiver. It's an experience that will change both of them.

Moving back and forth across time and place from youth in the 1960s and '70s?Eric's in Vancouver, Dale's on a farm in Kansas?to the pressure cooker of New York in the gay eighties, A Friend of Dorothy's is also a timeless, universal coming of age novel, in which the crucible of illness compels one young man to reach for something greater.