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Men with their Hands

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Synopsis

Sometimes your own family isn't enough.

Growing up different is never easy, but Michael, a deaf young man from a small town, knows that he must find his true family beyond his biological one. He struggles and fails to find others of his kind until he attends college in New York City.

There, we meet a variety of people from a deaf gay family of sorts: Eddie, an older accountant aching for love; Lee, an effeminate dishwasher with a pronounced weakness for red-haired men; Vince, a charismatic dancer who lives intensely no matter the state of his health; Neil, a brooding woodcarver who becomes a deaf woman’s obsession; Stan, a lanky stock boy at the A&P on Christopher Street; Ted, a hard of hearing college student with ambivalent feelings about the deaf community; and Rex, an ASL interpreter who avoids his own emotions during the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

It is through these people that Michael, no longer a smalltown boy, begins to create a new family of his own. Taking place from 1978 to 2003, his story will open your eyes and heart to what it means to be different in an indifferent world.

Review

Men with their Hands is fiction although it is very, very real. It is truthful and candid and honest and reads more like the author's auto biography than a novel. Yet that is no matter as the book stands on its own. Michael is a young deaf man from Iowa (a small town) who leaves home and his biological family and runs away to New York City where he finds a new family at a college for the deaf. He finds new friends and love and begins to realize what life is all about. Raymond Luczak, who is deaf himself, writers beautifully and brilliantly. He knows the areas; it is his life. Luczak is beautifully eloquent and here we see Michael on the verge of entering two new worlds--the larger world of the deaf and the world of gays. He becomes friends with some real characters from an accountant who is searching for love to a "ginger-crazed" feminine dishwasher. This is not the first thing I have read by Luczak and it certainly, I hope, will not be the last.

-- Amos Lassen