Books By Ulysses Grant Dietz
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Character Identities: Gay
Summary: I grew up Grant because Ulysses was too dangerous a name to call a kid in the 1950s. Conformity ruled, and Ulysses S. Grant's reputation was in the toilet. My given name Ulysses, however, ended up redining me as I was coming out in the early 1970s, altering my relationship with the world. On my father's side, an Alsatian immigrant to Colonial New York and, on my mother's, a Puritan dissenter seeking freedom on the Mayflower, added romance to my bland Leave it to Beaver life in Syracuse, New York in the 1960s. My world was a snapshot of prosperous, suburban, Post-War America for a baker's dozen of years, until two of my siblings died and I realized, at sixteen, that I was gay. The distillation of the lives of all those people who preceded me is the story of a baby boomer and a child of Stonewall; a Yalie who marched for gay pride in the 1970s; survived the AIDS crisis in the 1980s; adopted children in the 1990s; and finally married his Jewish partner of thirty-eight years in the twenty-first century. The people who made me who I am today are always on my mind. They danced on the edge of the Gilded Age after the Civil War, and helped define the American dream for three centuries. Among them were farmers, leather tanners, inventors, slaveowners, abolitionists, soldiers, industrialists, politicians, lawyers, a Nobel Prize winner, a president, and even a princess. They're all there in me. My story is their story, yet entirely my own.
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Character Identities: Gay
Summary: Two young men, a mysterious silver bowl, and a shuttered Victorian mansion steeped in the sadness of a family curse... Alex White and Xander Browne are newly-hired curators in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The rediscovery of a long-forgotten silver bowl covered in Arabic and Hebrew inscriptions sends the pair on a hunt for clues as to why it was made and by whom. Their search begins to unravel the secrets of the bowl's origins as well as its connection to the Bencliffe family, whose centuries-old history is darkened by a legacy of madness and suicide. What begins as a professional friendship for Alex and Xander quickly turns personal as the two find their lives increasingly intertwined in unanticipated ways. Far beyond a mere curatorial research project, the story of the Bencliffe bowl takes on the aura of destiny, as Alex and Xander make discoveries together that turn their world upside down. From neglected archives in New York and Boston to the shadowed corners of Cliffhanger, the turreted Bencliffe mansion looming over the Hudson River, the truth emerges, forcing Alex and Xander to wonder if, perhaps, their meeting might not have been a coincidence after all.
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Character Identities: Gay
Summary: Desmond Beckwith is not a happy man. A financial wizard with an international investment empire, he's also in love with his lifelong-but-straight friend Roger. At forty-five, in spite of a circle of supportive friends and an elegant New York townhouse full of antiques, he feels isolated and cut off from humankind. And with good reason. Desmond Beckwith is a two-hundred-fifty-year-old vampire. For nearly two centuries he has lived in New York, looking vainly for love and seeking to satisfy his twin thirsts for blood and sex in those places where men of his kind have always met to find release and solace. Into Desmond's sheltered, lonely world stumbles Tony Chapman, an unemployed museum curator, down on his luck and one step away from being out on the streets. To their mutual astonishment, Tony proceeds to turn Desmond's protected little world on its head, and to unlock pieces of Desmond's past lives and loves that were deeply buried in Desmond's memory.
Word Count: Information not available
Character Identities: Gay, Lesbian
Summary: Desmond Beckwith is back. He's handsome, he's rich, and he's gay. And he's looking for a house in Jersey. Desmond, you see, is a vampire. He has a job he loves, he can get blood whenever he needs it. But he thinks he wants a family, and that can get complicated when you're nearly 300 years old and don't know how to drive. Vampire in Suburbia picks up the story of Desmond Beckwith fifteen years after the events of the first book, Desmond. In the wake of 9/11 he's moved his financial firm from lower Manhattan to an office tower in downtown Newark, New Jersey. As his current life-cycle winds down and he regenerates once again to the age of twenty-one, the age he was when he was turned in 1745, Desmond needs to rebuild the life he had, a life that had become filled with people who are important to him. Looking for a place to live in the suburban greenbelt outside of Newark, Desmond revisits places from his past, and meets a handsome bearded curator who stirs up emotions Desmond had thought were long packed away. Desmond realizes that, this time around, there's got to be more to life than money, blood and anonymous sex. He hopes he'll find it in suburbia.
