guarded view
by DL Alvarez
guarded view is the the 19th book in the Fellow Travelers Series. It is available as a letterpress softcover, an ebook, and as a special Artist's Edition with jacket cover featuring artwork by Jerome Caja (see each of these three options in the dropdown below)
“DL Alvarez has written a beautiful memoir about San Francisco in the early nineteen-nineties. The city is a maze, and our Ariadne is the resourceful, curious, and humane DL. The center of the maze is the promised land—a livable city, a livable life, a home, an orgasm, a museum show. In guarded view three storylines interlink: the failing health of friend and gallerist Rick Jacobsen (KiKi Gallery) and with it the many stories of AIDS that refracted through everything; the transformation of DL into a visual artist—and what an artist he is; and the transformation of DL into a sex worker, specifically a Dom Top complete with uniform and bag of tools. It is a bildungsroman in that DL, the new boy, learns a lot, especially lessons in grief.”
—Robert Glück, from the afterword
“It’s a perfect testament of the fortitude and wit of a generation that often gets written off as ‘lost.’ This is a voice singing gorgeously from some dark, sexual, alley.”
—Justin Vivian Bond
