"Of this set of short stories, my favorite is 'Betrayed by David Bowie.' Here's a gay Jewish guy bonding with another gay Jewish guy in the Seventies over David Bowie's music.
Well, my straight Jewish high school classmate, a Howard Lee like myself, published a paperback novel last summer called Hitching to Bowie: A 70's Road Trip Tale of Music, Miles and Discovery. In the book the author Howard Lee Kramer (then a college student) bonds with his identical twin brother (also straight) over Bowie's music. HL had hitched to the concert and got a lift from, among numerous types, a nascent gay activist who explains the budding gay rights movement to his straight passenger who admits to coming away enlightened.
I think the writings, the short story and the later novel, can be read as corollaries. The book does seem to supplement much of Lev Raphael's tale.
By coincidence, I bumped into this classmate just this afternoon in the cafe at Politics and Prose. We hadn't seen each other since before Covid, and we caught up. He tried to sell me a copy of the book, which the attached picture will prove I had previously purchased."
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