Selected Author Brogan

JIM BROGAN Author of A TIME TO LIVE

After the usual oppressive childhood of a gay man coming of age in the 1950s, Jim Brogan attended Princeton and Yale, only to bolt from the east coast at the age of twenty-five to emigrate to San Francisco in 1967. Intrigued by the happenings during the "summer of love," he nevertheless threw himself into teaching his courses at San Francisco State University. However, the student and faculty strikes of 1968-9 forced him to confront the injustices of American society and he found himself "radicalized," out on the sidewalks picketing and even temporarily "terminated" by the infamous S. I. Hayakawa. He did survive though and, once granted the safety of tenure, began teaching one of the first gay literature courses in the country in 1972.
That same year he met his current lover and, remembering all the pessimistic pronouncements he had heard about long-term gay relationships, he decided to write an autobiography focusing on ideas which might be helpful for male-male romances. Jack and Jim appeared in 1981 and, fortunately for the book's credibility, he and Jack recently celebrated twenty-five years of living together, first in San Francisco and then, beginning in 1981, in a small town on the coast north of the city where he wrote his second book, a novel, Casey: The Bi-coastal Kid (1984), which explores the emerging bisexuality of a teenager on the eve of attending college.
Living on the coast brought many joys, not the least of which was visiting the Bay Area's several nude beaches. As the sand inevitably flowed through the hour-glass, however, Jim found himself confronting the image of himself at fifty, a typical middle-aged man now ignored by most of the younger generation of well- buffed gays. Furthermore, thanks to the success of his open relationship with Jack, he got to check out other men only to become frustrated at not being able to find new sexual partners. This "revolting development" led him to empathize more and more with single, middle-aged gay men who were romantically frustrated. What if he had to survive the death of a lover from AIDS and face the frantic nineties living by himself in San Francisco? The result is A Time To Live, a novel that does not deny the trauma of aging within the gay community but does dramatize some suggestions on how to survive gracefully after fifty and still have a reasonable amount of fun.