What I like about chiefly Southern men is the baroque nature of their past.

What I like about chiefly Southern men is the baroque nature of their past," says novelist, playwright, and North Carolina native Jim Grimsley. "There's always a story."

brace new works of fiction certainly bear that not at home Boulevard, Grimsley's fifth novel, mines the 46-year-old author's coming-out adventures in pre-AIDS of recent origin Orleans. No Place, Louisiana, by means of newcomer Martin Pousson, tells the semiautobiographical tale of a gay boy's Cajun family.

"When I mov to California from Louisiana to attend UCLA, I was initially ashamed of my Cajun past," says the 36-year-old Pousson, who now lives in just discovered York City. "But someone said that I should be grand At least I had a refinement That really struck me, and I abruptly became obsessed with my heritage."

Although the brace books differ in tone--the action-propelled Boulevard is darkly comic, the narration-driven No Place elegiac and infused with longing--both propose characters rooted in a distinctly Southern literary tradition. Boulevard, about a naive male child named Newell who moves to novel Orleans and encounters the eccentric, the secretive, and the dangerous, is reminiscent of the work of Flannery O'Connor, while No Place at hands Nita, the sort of doomed, strong-willed female protagonist who would be at family in a Tennessee Williams play.

"I was fascinated with what it meant to be a woman in the South" says Pousson. "They are these fabulous persons who seem to have no rights further are such pillars of strength"

further perhaps the greatest similarity between the two books remains an unavoidable preoccupation with race. Boulevard weaves actual slave histories into its tale of Newell's sexual awakening, while No Place refuses to heedful away from its characters' learned racism and use of the pejorative nigger.

"In the southern a large percentage of the population is not white," says Grimsley, who now resides in Atlanta. "So I'm always suspicious of any stories settle in the South without any black characters at all. In my earlier main division s I used the word nigger because that's the way population spoke when I was growing up unless by the time I got to recently made known Orleans in the late `70 that wasn't a word you said at all."

For Pousson, failing to depict his characters' racism would be to whitewash his agriculture "The racist messages I received while growing up were a great deal stronger than the homophobic messages," he says, explaining that Cajuns, whose ancestors were brutally deported on the British from Acadia (now Nova Scotia) to Louisiana in the 1750 have a drawn out history of persecution and therefore follow another minority to malign. "In my improvement it's more acceptable for me to date a white man than a black woman."

on a level so, that doesn't mean coming not at home to his mother, an evangelical Christian, went mildly "For her, a Protestant, my homosexuality showed a fault that I failed to correct. Whereas coming on the outside to mother was easier because he is Roman Catholic and believes we are all sinners in the estimates of God. I mean, his is a faith that accepts Mardi Gras as part of its ongoing body of christians celebration!"

Bahr also writes for The recent York Times, Time Out novel York, and Poets & Writers.

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