OUT NOW! The Old Man at My Door by Rodney Ross

A winter storm warning blanketed the local news stations before the blizzard itself. This blustery Saturday was going to be sweatpants, banana bread, and a Golden Girls binge for Renata Todd. But at her farmhouse door, already flocked with fresh snow, comes an unexpected knock: Albin Lawrence, an old man who grew up in the house in the 40s and 50s.

Renata’s caution yields to common sense as she welcomes him in for a tour. What danger could a shaky man over eighty, who has only one arm, represent?

Albin’s reluctant to leave and eager to talk. As Renata welcomes him into the kitchen to, he takes a barstool to tell his story … his stern parents’ suspicions of his homosexuality; the day he fled with his parents, never to return; navigating the decades of secret bars, marginal jobs, free love, questionable choices, and AIDS; and a relationship truncated by social pressure and tragedy.

As the episodes turn darker, Renata begins to uneasily suspect something more is afoot.

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OUT NOW! Smoking with Didi by Rodney Ross

At his older sister Didi’s request, Pete Garhart makes a reluctant trip from Miami to small-town Ohio for his father’s funeral. Beyond the sun, he leaves little else behind. Alcohol has drained any momentum from his culinary career as a chef, and he’s been reduced to line cook at Applebee’s. His string of failed relationships have begun to resemble a line-up of wooden soldiers, all with great guns and the same fade haircut. And, now in his late 40’s, he’s painfully aware of enroaching invisibility in his own community.

Back in his hometown, he’s battered by flashbacks of an anxious adolescence and his father’s rejection of a queer son, yet also finds the house he grew up in renovated and the town itself shorn of other memories. But bigger revelations are yet to come, including an unexpected hot tub reunion with a straight high school crush and a road trip back to Florida with Vantage Blue-loving Didi. She has a few things she wants to get off her chest about their own sibling alienation, but the surprise may be hers when Pete opens a floodgate of his own admissions.

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