Novelist Robert Rodi is bringing back his iconic 1990s gay novels with the help of a Kickstarter campaignand he's adding in a new book showing where all the characters are today.
In 1992 Rodi published Fag Hag, a dark comedy about a woman romantically obsessed with a gay man. The nineties was a boom era for gay fiction, and Fag Hag's success inspired Rodi to follow with further satires of gay character types and other sacred cows, including Closet Case, Drag Queen and Kept Boy.
A decade later, with gay fiction's popularity on the wane ( thanks in part to an increasing gay presence in mainstream media ), Rodi switched to other genresincluding nonfiction and comic booksand eventually his novels fells out of print. Then in 2012, inspired by the huge advances in self-publishing, he was inspired to produce the 20th Anniversary edition of Fag Hag, "with the cover and design treatment I always thought it should've had."
Delighted with finally having complete control over his creations, he planned to bring back the rest of the novels as well, under the umbrella title Robert Rodi Essentials. "The time was right. The world has changed so much in the past two decades, especially for gay people, that the novels are basically a time capsule. They show of a way of life that, while in many ways familiar, seems in other ways like a Merchant-Ivory movie."
Unfortunately, Rodi's progress has been slowed by the constant flow of freelance writing assignments that occupy his time. So he's turned to Kickstarter to help fund the completion of the series. "If I can raise enough to clear a few months of my schedule, I can turn down other work and focus on the Essentials." And to make the prospect more attractive to fans who already have the original editions of his books, he's adding in a new one: Essentially Postmillennial, which will feature a series of novellas showing his characters in 2014. "We get to find out who's lived, who's died; who's still together, who's broken up; who's on Grindr, who's on Propecia."
So far the campaign has been a roaring success, raising almost three-quarters o its funding goal in the first twenty-four hours. "I guess nineties nostalgia is the new thing," says Rodi. "Either that, or people just still like to laugh."
The Robert Rodi Essentials Kickstarter page URL is www.kickstarter.com/projects/1221008422/robert-rodi-essentials-6-iconic-gay-novels-new-7th
Shortened link: tinyurl.com/o36klnh .