Frontiers [Hardcover]

The year is 1797. John Chapman, an impulsive young man and a sexual outlaw, forsaken in the bitter winter of the Allegheny Plateau, clings to his one tenuous dream: to claim a future in an ever-elusive Western outpost. Unarmed and near death, Chapman is on the brink of giving up when an unexpected rescue changes his course in life forever, and he discovers the true meaning of survival.

The mysterious savior is Daniel McQuay, a frontiersman who has already fought to the death to protect his last holdings of ammunition, supplies, and land. He's a loner whose overpowering bond with Chapman is as shifting as a shadow, as dark as the prairie tale he spins for the impressionable young man. He tells of a deranged killer who once roamed the Plateau terrorizing the Senecas, whose torture of their youngest was only the beginning of his crimes, and who disappeared one terrible night into Allegheny legend.

For Chapman, the story clings to his transient soul like a nightmare, tracking him further South along the frozen banks of the Conewango River, and into the safe haven of a gentle Indian woman named Gwennie. His journey also takes him into the intimate deliverance of Palmer, a brash but irresistibly innocent seventeen-year-old settler whose forging of the frontier is a search for his own identity in a vast and inviolate land. Together, Chapman, Palmer, and Gwennie, redoubtable and daring, carve a new life out of the edge of an endless wilderness. But their struggle for a piece of theAmerican Dream becomes more treacherous than the elements as they face the most unpredictable enemy of all -- man -- in a life-and-death struggle that unfolds in the shadow of a legendary and avenging evil.

Weaving an uncommon story of love and loyalty, a vivid rendering of time and place, and a transcendent novel of survival, Michael Jensen moves beyond the boundaries of Western tradition, sweeping the reader into a seductive, primal landscape, where the untamed savagery of the wild intersects with the senses of the mind, the spirit, and the body. Raffish yet lyrical, sensuous and suspenseful, "Frontiers" breaks new ground in its depiction of the power and illogic of human affections, and in its stirring and original evocation of the American West.

During my book tour I've often been asked what led me to write such an unusual novel. The fact is I wrote Frontiers because I was tired of much of gay fiction. It seemed almost every book was set in New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco and was about young gay guys dancing all night, shopping at IKEA and arguing over who made the better role model--Madonna or Cher. Or the books were about older gay guys bitter they were no longer the young gay guys.

Don't get me wrong. I've read some terrific books set in those cities, but I was ready for something else. It also seemed to me that the history of gay people started in Greece, then vanished and didn't reemerge (with a few exceptions) until the 1960's. I wanted to set the record, er, straight.

The frontier was often a place to where refugees from "civilized" society would flee. (By the way, Frontiers is being called the first gay western. It is western, but not in a "cowboy and Indian" sense. The west in 1797 was along the Ohio River.) It only made sense to me that people with same-sex attractions would head to the place where they were most likely to be left alone.

Larry Kramer recently wrote that he was frustrated by how little gay men and lesbians (and the rest of society) know about our own contributions to the history of this country. When I started Frontiers I set out to write an exciting, sexy, and fast-paced story, but I'd like to think that maybe I also helped contribute to doing away with the myth that only heterosexual people founded this country.