Boston Boys Club [Paperback]

Johnny Diaz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 24, 2007

Flanked by gorgeous brick row houses in the heart of Boston's South End, the Club Café is a bar where everybody knows your name--and who you slept with last. Every night men like Tommy Perez, Rico DiMio, and Kyle Andrews take their place among the glistening crowd sporting chest-defining shirts and lots of smooth, tanned skin, sizing up the regulars and the new blood while TV monitors blare Beyoncé and Missy Elliott.

For Tommy, Thursdays at the Club Café in the company of his wingman Rico and a Skinny Black Bitch (vodka and Diet Coke) are unmissable. Recently relocated from Miami to Boston to take a reporting job at The Boston Daily, Tommy is finding it hard to break away from his tight-knit Cuban family, but his homesickness goes into rapid remission when he meets Mikey, a blue-eyed, boyish guidance counselor from Cape Cod. Smart, funny, and wicked cute, Mikey is perfect boyfriend material...until his drinking leads Tommy to suspect that he's got some issues of his own. Rico--a tough-talking, Italian-American accountant with a gamma ray smile and mournful green eyes that hint at a past he'll admit to no one--is sure Mikey is bad news, but to Rico any relationship that lasts longer than three hours sounds like bad news. Then there's Kyle, the lean, preening model and former reality show star who makes a red-carpet entrance into the CC every Thursday as if a swarm of cameras still follows his every move, but whose real life is about to take a dramatic turn he never anticipated.

Over the course of one unforgettable year, Tommy is forced to rethink everything he's ever believed about life, lust, and love. And in the Club Café, a place filled with endless possibilities--of stumbling upon the perfect partner, the perfect story idea, or just a play buddy for the night--Tommy might finally discover the person he was meant to be.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Boston Boys Club is racy, funny, and smart. With his unforgettable trio of narrators, Johnny Diaz ushers the reader through the sex-filled, weirdly skewed world of contemporary gay Boston. You're going to love this book." -- Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin and We Disappear

"Johnny Diaz brings to palpable life the ins, out, ups and downs of gay city life and its most dangerous pastime: dating. In chronicling the love lives - or lack thereof - of three good friends who meet weekly at the local watering hole, Johnny Diaz gives us situations, hopes, fears, and especially characters that all readers will identify with, and may even recognize as themselves. At turns comic, touching, and tragic, Boston Boys Club is sure to serve as a testament of American gay life in the new millennium, and the timeless search for Mister Right - or Mister Right Now. An addictive read.'' -- J.G. Hayes, author of A Map of The Harbor Islands

From the Publisher

"Make way for the boys of summer! Johnny Diaz has written a sexy beach-read romp you won't be able to put down." --William J. Mann, author of Where the Boys Are and All American Boy

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Kensington Books (April 24, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0758215452
• ISBN-13: 978-0758215451
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,134,037 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Johnny Diaz is a media reporter for The Boston Globe's Business section, where he writes about local TV news, radio, print and advertising. Prior to that job, Johnny was a features writer for The Globe's Living/Arts section for three years.
Before that he was a general assignment Metro reporter for his hometown newspaper, The Miami Herald. As a reporter there, he shared in the 2000 Pulitzer award coverage of the federal seizure of Elian Gonzalez and the chaos that erupted in Miami afterwards. He also covered some of the biggest breaking stories in South Florida, such as the Gianni Versace murder. He was also a featured contributor in the first Chicken Soup for the Latino Soul. Johnny is the author of Boston Boys Club, Miami Manhunt and Beantown Cubans. He is also currently a part-time journalism instructor at Emerson College in Boston. On his downtime, he enjoys hiking in the Blue Hills south of Boston every weekend and reading fiction.

Readers can visit his website: www.beantowncuban.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Possibly the worst book I've ever read, February 29, 2008

By 

Chad le Couteau - See all my reviews

This review is from: Boston Boys Club (Paperback)

Hi, I really hate to write a negative review but it's really necessary in this case. This is one of the worst books I've ever read. The main thing about it is the bizarre "brand-name-dropping" style in which it is written. I guess it's the author's effort to seem current, but it's really distracting. I'm not sure why it's written this way; maybe it's a comment on our advertising-drunk culture. The fact that a lot of the references are competing brands tells me that it's not paid product-placement.

As I sit on my Pottery Barn couch, resting my Reebok running shoes on my Ethan Allen coffee table, I read this terrible book. The bubbles from my Coca Cola tickle my nose and I accidentally spill some onto my J. Crew shirt, so I quickly grab a Bounty paper towel. ...you get the idea

I got so bored reading this story that I used a highlighter pen to pick out all the brand name references. My book is now very colorful; they are on almost every page.

I read this entire book a couple months ago and have no recollection of the plot or characters, only of Coca Cola, American Eagle, and Gatorade.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well-written, pleasant story of life and love, May 14, 2007

By 

Bob Lind "camelwest" (Phoenix, AZ United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Boston Boys Club (Paperback)

Tomas "Tommy" Perez is 29 year old Cuban-American who recently relocated from his native Miami to Boston, to take a job as a reporter for a newspaper there. He misses his family, friends and the Cuban community back in Florida, but is slowly becoming more comfortable with Boston, as he checks out the local gay bars with Rico, a hunky Italian who has taken Tommy under his wing. When Tommy meets Mikey, Rico cautions him that Mikey seems to have a drinking problem, but Tommy is already falling in love with Mikey and doesn't heed his friend's advice.

But Tommy doesn't hesitate to give advice to Rico, when he sees that Rico seems to be afraid of developing anything more than a no-strings sexual relationship with any of the various cute guys he meets at the bar. Rico has been hurt in the past, as has Tommy, but Rico seems to have built a wall around himself emotionally, to avoid being hurt again, not realizing that would block him from true fulfillment as a loving person.

The book also deals with Kyle, a superficial and self-centered 23 year old gay boy who is trying to use his "15 minutes of fame" as a cast member on the "Real Life" show to jump start a modeling/acting career that isn't going so well. The surprise result of an HIV test brings him a lot closer to "reality" than he wants to be.

The author's bio seems to mirror Tommy's to some extent, which makes one wonder how much of this is autobiographical. Diaz's first novel is a narrative that is told alternately by the three leads, as well as Tommy's boyfriend Mikey. That allows the reader to get a better insight into the characters, and also to see one know what parts of his life and dreams he isn't sharing with his friends. It's a well-written, relatively light "beach read", and recommended as such. Four stars out of five.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars This is Boston?, June 19, 2008

By 

RicF964 "RicF964" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Boston Boys Club (Paperback)

I've lived in Boston most of my life and have spent many evenings at Club Cafe'. If I were Tommy or Rico or any of these characters, I would have jumped off the Tobin Bridge years ago. Diaz's writing is juvenile, especially for someone who makes a living by writing and getting through this book was very difficult.

Although one character, Kyle (KY), is meant to be shallow, they're all shallow in their own way. Diaz keeps mentioning the brand of clothing they wear, like Aberzombie & Fitch, Gap, Old Navy...If I were wearing Gap, I wouldn't be bragging about it. Tommy gets a new condo and has Pergo flooring installed...why do we care? I understand that authors need to change some things, but if you're going to use the real name of the bar...Club Cafe'...then you should use the real nickname...Club So Gay, not So Gay Cafe'. And the only high point in these guys lives is to go to CC EVERY THURSDAY?!?!? Get a life!

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