On the Road With Joe Westmoreland

"The road erases everything. Here in the United States, you can drive for hours in a single cardinal direction without turning the wheel or grazing the brakes. By the time you get to where you're going, your life story will be rewritten. That, at least, is the dream of the old, worn-out American road story. Joe Westmoreland's isn't exactly a road story, even though it's billed that way, with a grainy picture of a two-lane highway adorning the reverse of the title page."

"Reprinted now after 24 years as an obscure cult favorite, Tramps Like Us takes a long, slow pan across the variegated swirls of gay life in the 1970s and '80s, from post-hippie sexual awakenings to the era of HIV. "I wrote Tramps Like Us to remember what happened to me and my friends," Westmoreland says in the afterword, an aspiration whose simplicity matches the plainspokenness of the novel's style."

"Westmoreland's debut novel was originally published in April of 2001, 14 years after the author had moved to New York City. It had, to put it mildly, a troubled launch. First, his publisher died a week after the book came out. Then, later in the year, Westmoreland planned a big release party for his birthday, September 11. Needless to say, he had to cancel. "My book was forgotten," he writes in this edition's afterword, "even by me.""

Tramps Like Us traces the gradual shaping of life through small sensory details and patiently evolving relationships among gay men from the 1970s into the 1980s and the HIV era. Road travel appears as a motif but functions mainly as backdrop to quieter temporal and emotional shifts. The prose is plainspoken and oriented toward remembering lived experience. The book experienced a troubled 2001 debut when its publisher died and a planned September 11 birthday release party was canceled, leaving the work obscure until a later reprinting. The project began as a memoir concept and became largely fictionalized during composition.

Read at The Nation