Voice of Force

Sexual difference cuts deep through G. Roger Denson's VOICE OF FORCE, a novel chronicling the escalating estrangement and tragedy that ensue as a gay man and straight man search for mutual ground despite the family, faith, profits, and politics dividing them. Newspaper critic Ragland Hughes is openly gay. Opera tenor Cosimo Fratangelo is famously straight. No one gay or straight says a word as they watch the men's relationship evolve from professional association to loving friendship-so long as both men remain alive and profitable. When the body of one of the men washes ashore off Long Island Sound, convulsive testimony indicts the survivor as the prosecution's lone suspect. The media melee that ensues not only casts unwelcome light on the forces keeping a gay man and a straight man from enjoying friendship, it brands Hughes a predator of heterosexual men and Fratangelo a sociopath driven by ambition. As for the disparate voices having their say in the two men's lives, sexuality is to be defined and judged as something much more than genital union. Part thwarted love story, part cautionary tale, part philosophical rant, VOICE OF FORCE sounds out the deep divide of sexual difference running through even the most liberal of enclaves. With Destiny seen as neither predestined path nor consequence of human choice but the balance of submission and resistance to the history bearing down on us, a simple criminal case is made a microcosm of ancient familial fear. We know a murder has been committed but in the end we're left deciphering what the larger crime is and how long it's been in the making.