Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States

Selection, Over the Rainbow Project, GLBT Round Table of the American Library Association Finalist, General Fiction, Lambda Literary Awards Winner, Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction, Publishing Triangle Winner, Duggins outstanding Mid-Career novelist Award, Lambda Literary Foundation

Award-winning novelist Trebor Healey depicts San Francisco in the 1980s and '90s in poetic prose that is both ribald and poignant, and a crossing into the American West that is dreamy, mythic, and visionary.

When troubled twenty-one-year-old Seamus Blake meets the strong and self-possessed Jimmy (just arrived in San Francisco by bicycle from his hometown in Buffalo, New York), he feels his life may finally be taking a turn for the better. But the ensuing romance proves short-lived as Jimmy dies of an AIDS-related illness. The grieving Seamus is obliged to keep a promise to Jimmy: "Take me back the way I came."

And so Seamus sets out by bicycle on a picaresque journey with the ashes, hoping to bring them back to Buffalo. He meets truck drivers, waitresses, college kids, farmers, ranchers, Marines, and other travelers--each one giving him a new perspective on his own life and on Jimmy's death. When he meets and becomes involved with a young Native American man whose mother has recently died, Seamus's grief and his story become universal and redemptive.