The Closet Diaries — Multiple Authors

The Closet Diaries is the story of three men who met in college where they became intimately and sexually involved, and follows them through the various stages of their lives, careers, marriages and deaths. Along the way the history of the Gay movement is highlighted in novelistic form, from the pre Stonewall days when men were beaten and imprisoned for socializing with their own kind, through the freedom of the sexual revolution in the LGBTQ community, up to and through the scourge of AIDS. And then near the end of the book we enter a more free and open time where same sex marriage becomes a right and a legal breakthrough. One of the men, Alex Prestegard Sr., married and had three sons. The older son, Alex Jr. is a doctor and is given the task of fulfilling his father's death bed wish of burning his diaries that he has locked away in a trunk in his closet. Alex Jr., upon finding and setting out to burn the diaries, decides instead to read them, and enters a world of long hidden secrets where he finds the truth about his mother's death and his father's sexuality. The novel then becomes multi-dimensional, in that there are diary entries, scenes from the past and of the present, as Alex Jr. reads the diaries, later burns them, and carries out the task of selling the house where his father lived and he grew up. In the end, Alex Jr. and his lover Steven themselves face the ultimate decision of whether they should marry or not. During the process of Alex Jr.'s reading the diaries and preparing the house for sale, the two of them separate after a series of disagreements over very personal ideas of what a relationship should be. But they are reunited during the final scenes after Alex Jr. comes to the realization that he doesn't want to spend the rest of his life as his father had done, bitter and alone.