The Beauty of Men

So I've been reading Andrew Holleran's The Beauty of Men, episodically, twenty or thirty pages at a time, mainly late at night before I fall asleep, with continued admiration for his prose style but a rising gorge against his protagonist: I simply loathe the portrayal of contemporary gay men as long-suffering, doomed queens. Am I the only queer who wants to run a few of these characters through a slapping booth? Do we need to perpetuate the message that gay men are virtually invisible after forty, that they have no possible chance at love? I haven't read (nor do I want to read) any reviews or criticism of the novel, and I'm probably too late to join that discussion--which I'm sure is out there--but mainly I'm just, well, appalled. Forty pages from the end of this novel, I'm losing hope of a redeeming moment for this self-loathing whiner.

There, I said it.