Counterfeit Life

Nowhere to run

Some unfortunate souls fall into bad situations through no fault of their own. Such was the case with Mitchell and his mother. Victor Fausse’s nephew Mitchell suffered a closed head injury in the same car accident that killed his father and condemned his mother, Victor’s sister Marci, to live out her life in physical and emotional pain. Then there are the people who throw their promise away with both hands. Victor Fausse might have had it all. He was handsome, loaded with talent with a promising future, but he turned his back on his own dreams and pushed away from whom he might have been to run toward perdition. As the 1960s drew to a close, Victor wasn’t the only casualty in his chase to ruin himself; he took down anyone close to him. Victor’s wife, daughter, and son were all casualties of his decisions, but it was Michell’s innocence that was the fatality.

The Gayest Square Mile

Now a days the LGBT community is pretty nearly everywhere. Places like Ferndale and Pleasant Ridge, communicate a very welcoming LGBT attitude today, but back in the day, the early 1970s to be exact, the Palmer Park area of Detroit got the reputation as the Gayest Square Mile in Michigan. I don’t have the facts to back up that claim, but I think it’s very likely true, maybe not the gayest neighborhood in Michigan, but certainly there was a goodly presence.

When I wrote this book as well as the first book in the series, Nations Within, I wanted to be accurate and tried to do my homework about LGBT Detroit. I found the map above as part of that research.

Stumbling on this map wasn’t a eureka moment for me, you would have to be very isolated not to know what neighborhoods are around. Palmer Park, even back then, was not the only place gay people lived.

As an east sider with gay/lesbian co-workers, acquaintances and friends there were gayborhoods on every side of town, but I did think this was interesting.