Not in Oz Anymore

ISBN: 1478160330

Author: Dennis, Jeffery P

Condition: New

Product Description Residents call it Oz, Xanadu, Heaven, or just Here: a collection of urban neighborhoods, college towns, and resort areas where most gay people live, or have lived in the past, or plan to live someday. It is surrounded on all sides by Kansas, not the U.S. state but a vast expanse of cities, towns, farms, and forests, where straight people live and speak and are visible. Some gay people live there, too, but they are generally silent and invisible. After 17 years in Oz, Joe returned to Kansas for a job. It was a like exploring a new, alien planet, where the basic rules and conventions of the life he knew are turned upside down. The most pervasive rule was erasure. Friends, co-workers, his doctor, his auto mechanic, movies, tv pro-grams, magazines, novels, college classes, all of them proc-laimed, over and over, day after day, with giddy certainty, that gay people did not exist. From the Author This is about horror movies, tv sitcoms, auto garages, college psychology classes, romance novels, job interviews, sermons, dating, friends, family Thanksgiving dinners, and boojums. About the Author I wrote my first novel at the age of sixteen. It was a heroic fantasy based on "The Lord of the Rings," except my hero traveled west instead of east, and he had a magic sword instead of a magic ring.For the last ten years I've been a college professor, first in gender studies and then in criminology. Research, teaching, and committee work takes up a lot of time. Not to mention moving every couple of years, from New York to Maine to Florida to Ohio, and then back to New York again.But I'm dusting off some old projects and starting some new ones.