Disorderly Men: A Novel
Three gay men in pre-Stonewall NYC find their fates thrown together in the police raid of a Village bar
Roger Moorhouse is a Wall Street banker and Westchester family man with a preciously guarded secret. As the shouting begins and flashlights blaze in his face, the life he’s carefully curated over the years—a fancy new office overlooking lower Broadway, a house in Beechmont Woods, his wife and children—is about to come crashing down around him.
Columbia literature professor Julian Prince lives a comparatively uncloseted life when he finds his first committed relationship tested to its limits. How could he explain to Gus, a fearless young artist, that he couldn’t stay with him that weekend because the woman who was still technically Julian’s fiancée would be visiting? But when Gus is struck unconscious by a police baton, Julian comes out of hiding to protect him, even if exposure means losing everything.
For Danny Duffy, an Irish kid from the Bronx with a sassy mouth and diverse group of friends, the raid is a galvanizing, Spartacus moment. Danny doesn’t have too much left to lose; his family has just disowned him. But once his name appears in the newspaper, he’ll be fired from his job at Sloan’s Supermarket, where he’s risen to assistant manager of produce, and begin a journey that veers between political enlightenment and violent revenge.
The three men find themselves in a police wagon together, their hidden lives threatened to be revealed to the world. Blackmail, a private investigator, Gus’s disappearance, and Danny’s quest for retribution propel Disorderly Men to its piercing conclusion, as each man meets the boundaries of his own fear, love, and shame. The stakes for each are different, but all of them confront a fundamental question: how much happiness is he allowed to have … and what share of it will he lay claim to?
"Edward Cahill’s wonderfully titled Disorderly Men is a bright, vivid, funny, smart homage to the pre-Stonewall era. A novel at once timeless and timely."
—David Leavitt, author of Shelter in Place
“What a wonderous world Cahill has created full of pathos and driven by memorable characters and a divinely complex plot. Beyond the historical realities of post-war America, the novel—in extravagant and seductive prose—explores the interior lives of gay men eager for pleasure and desperate to push beyond their own perpetual suffering. Disorderly Men is an absolute triumph.”
– Amber Dermont, author of The Starboard Sea
"In New York City half a dozen years before Stonewall, gay men knew who they loved but not yet who they were. Cahill brings their world to life in a big-hearted novel of existential suspense. A closeted banker fences with a blackmailer, an English professor searches for a brutalized lover, and a grocery store manager loses his job and his family—and the reader turns the pages faster and faster to find out not just whether these men make it but also how gays became people of integrity at a time when shame was so deeply nested in laws, institutions, and their own psyches."
– Caleb Crain, author of Overthrow
“Edward Cahill’s Disorderly Men is a harrowing period thriller, set in mid-century New York City and its upscale suburbs, that follows its gay male heroes, victims and anti-heroes across a landscape and narrative that feels simultaneously true to its era and somehow outside it, closer to now. Corruption, sex, betrayal and the thrilling surprise of unlikely friendships hide in its dark bars and secret party rooms, its Ivy league classrooms, artists’ studios, Westchester dining rooms, cut-throat corporate offices and crowded apartments. Confidently plotted, its fast-paced scenes rich with glorious and persuasively realized melodrama, Disorderly Men marries the swooning melancholy of Douglas Sirk films and gay pulp fiction to the righteous heartbreak of classic kitchen-sink realism. A striking debut!”
– Ben Neihart, author of Hey, Joe
"A moving and deeply engaging portrait of pre-Stonewall New York gay male communities in crisis. Cahill, while exploring a complex web of classes, social positions, and professions, deftly uncovers the emotional and political complexity of the period. Disorderly Men vividly imagines the tone and texture of a gay world now almost completely gone."
– Michael Bronski, author of A Queer History of the United States
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"A teeming multitude of characters and places, Disorderly Men honors the victims of a police raid on a gay bar by showing us their imperfections, their carnality, and their terrible compromises. Mid-century New York has never been so frightening or so beautiful.”
– Benjamin Nugent, author of Fraternity
