Now and Yesterday (53 page)

Stephen Greco

 

 

 

ABOUT THIS GUIDE

 

The suggested questions are included
to enhance your group's reading of
Stephen Greco's
Now and Yesterday
.

1. Peter is fifty-nine and Will is twenty-eight. To what extent does the age gap between them affect the development of their relationship? Are there examples in the book of Peter and Will attending a social event or performance together and experiencing it in different ways, because of their age? What other factors, besides age, prevent Peter and Will from getting together sooner?
   
2. How do Peter and Will change over the course of the novel? Does one change more than the other? (Make reference to the decades in which Peter and Will grew up—respectively, the '50s and '60s, and the '80s and '90s—and the kinds of “programming” they would have received from their parents.) Does Peter learn anything from Will? Does Will learn anything from Peter?
   
3. By the end of the novel, Peter has realized he is still wounded by the loss of his first long-term boyfriend to AIDS, and that that wound has kept him from embracing new love, with Will. What does it mean to “heal” from such a wound? How is Peter on his way toward healing, as the novel ends? In what ways, historically, have events like plagues and wars left whole groups of people wounded psychologically, and how do these compare with AIDS?
   
4. Some older gay men find they don't fit comfortably into today's “post-liberation” gay culture, where issues like AIDS and coming out are less central than they were in past decades. In what ways does Peter fit in and/or not fit in? Does Will, a much younger man, fit in any better?
   
5. How does the novel treat the fact that Peter's friend Jonathan has survived AIDS only to be exposed to another disease associated with men of the age that he and Peter are now? With irony? Sympathy? How do Jonathan's actions reveal the way he has chosen to embrace his fate? How are other gay men of Peter and Jonathan's generation depicted in the novel?
   
6. Because of AIDS, older single gay men like Peter face an extremely limited dating pool of available men of the same age. What romantic and sexual options are open to Peter, other than dating younger men? How do these compare with the romantic and sexual options for straight men of that generation?
   
7. Peter and Will are both affected by their road trip upstate, to visit Jonathan. What happens to them, emotionally, on that trip? How are things different between the two when they return to the city, and why?
   
8. Is Peter fooling himself to think that the McCaw assignment is “just another job”? Is he a sellout, by the standards espoused by his upstate friend Arnie? Is Arnie noble for still holding on to his old-school, politically correct standards? Are those standards obsolete? Have they been superseded by newer forms of political correctness?
   
9. Discuss the way gay life in New York and life upstate are depicted in this novel. Are Peter and Will typical gay men? Do they, because of their work in the media or other privileges, wield special influence over gay culture and contemporary culture at large?
   
10. Peter is a member of the “baby boom” generation. In what ways is he typical of the baby boomers and in what ways not? Historically speaking, how might the expectations of gay baby boomers have helped fuel the Stonewall rebellion and other liberation movements? How have boomer expectations shaped culture at large?
    

Excerpt from “East Coker” from
Four Quartets
by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1940 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright © renewed 1968 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

 

Excerpt from “The Death of Saint Narcissus” from
Poems Written in Early Youth,
by T. S. Eliot. Copyright © 1967, renewed 1995 by Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

 

Excerpt from “East Coker” and “The Death of Saint Narcissus” from
Collected Poems 1909–1962
by T. S. Eliot reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Limited.

 

Der Rosenkavalier
, Op. 59 by Richard Strauss © Copyright 1910, 1911 by Adolph Furstner, U.S. copyright renewed. Copyright 1943 assigned to Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd. (a Boosey & Hawkes company) for the world excluding Germany, Italy, Portugal and the formal territories of the USSR (excluding Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). Reprinted by permission. Libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. English version by Alfred Kalisch.

 

KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

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Copyright © 2014 by Stephen Greco

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

 

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ISBN: 978-1-6177-3060-3

 

eISBN-13: 978-1-61773-061-0
eISBN-10: 1-61773-061-0
First Kensington Electronic Edition: June 2014