Synopses & Reviews
"Okay, right now I have the ability to cleanly, statistically analyze my sexual life into a pie chart, and I feel as if this ability is only going to last a little longer before I fall back into my mindless sexual trough, so I have to write this down fast...."
If love doesn't stay, if no love is pure and platinum and lasting, okay. But Mike Albo, rueful and confused, keeps grasping for the vaporous ideal of love -- trying to find something solid, a love he felt he was promised a long time ago.
One summer in the East Village, in the hot, intoxicating bars, in the thick of beautiful men, Mike meets Eric. Eric is a masterpiece -- the irresistible, unattainable go-go boy. Eric has a boyfriend. Eric is untroubled by conscience. But Mike and Eric have a hallucinogenic affair.
As he ricochets from euphoria to despair, Mike does what any good student might do: he looks to the past for clues to the present. On break from his exhaustingly libidinous schedule, he goes home to visit his parents in the suburban town in which he was born. Tracing his emotional and sexual evolution -- including his obedient and weird attempts to meet the requirements of suburban normalcy -- Mike tries to answer the questions that plague each of us: "Am I okay? Whom should I love?"
Hornito is brutally, searingly honest, but it is also the work of a uninhibited comic. Mike Albo offers a stripped portrait of the young gay man in all his interior complexity, a tale at once wholly compelling and utterly naked. It's desperate. But there's hope. And it's also violently funny.
Synopsis
Albo brings his own witty and touching take on being young, single, and gay to his debut novel about a character of his own name whose suburban childhood is filled with bullies, rollerskates, satin shorts, and "Solid Gold" dancers. Albo evokes a poignant and nostalgic past and his vibrant search for love in the present.
Synopsis
"A gay coming-of-age story that's rip-roaringly funny and sympathetic."--People
David Sedaris and Sandra Bernhard rolled into one, Mike Albo offers his own unique, witty, and touching tale on being young, single, and gay in today's media-obsessed culture.
Juxtaposing a trip to his childhood home--where he has retreated to try to make some sense of his hectic existence in New York City--with memories of growing up gay in seventies suburbia, Albo creates Mike Albo. This character's memories are from a fictitious life that's outrageous, hilarious, and embarrassingly real. From a typical suburban childhood to his perpetual search for true love, Albo evokes a poignant, nostalgic past and a vibrant, energetic present. By turns vulnerable and jaded, flamboyant and obsessive, Hornito is full of subversive humor and outrageous irony.
About the Author
Mike Albo is a writer and a performer. He grew up mostly in the suburbs of Virginia. He has performed three solo shows, Mike Albo; Spray; and Please Everything Burst, each cowritten with Virginia Heffernan. Selections from these shows appear in Extreme Exposure: Solo Performance Texts from the 20th Century, edited by Jo Bonney. He also wrote a play called Sexotheque. He is a founder of the reknowned Dazzle Dancers. He lives in Brooklyn right now and wants to make sure you know he hasn't settled into that pleasant, calm, brownstoney life that these book bios always seem to imply.