“Every character should want something,” goes an overused adage of fiction-writing workshops, popularized by Kurt Vonnegut. (“Even if it is only a glass of water,” he added.) Novels centered on gay male experiences have, historically, epitomized this maxim. There’s the want for sex, often lots of it; for youth, exemplified most famously by Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella, “Death in Venice”; and for acceptance from straight culture, especially in work birthed during the peak of the AIDS crisis, such as “Second Son” (1988), by Robert Ferro, in which a man with a deadly virus navigates his relationship with his close-knit family. Not to mention, a desire for glamour and for life’s finer things—travel abroad and summers in the country—that must be chased the way a collector would an unpaid credit-card bill. Edmund White’s 2016 gem, “Our Young Man,” opens with portrayals of a journalist and a bartender who scrape together their incomes in order to afford a house share on the Fire Island Pines in the early nineteen-eighties—a luxury, the book implies, that would be financially prohibitive in this millennium.

The first-person speakers of Nate Lippens’s Wisconsin Trilogy have checked out from want. They toil as bartenders and caterers; off the clock, they’re misanthropes with a few trusted confidants and a bevy of deceased acquaintances who occupy their thoughts. Across Lippens’s cycle of semi-autobiographical novels—“My Dead Book,” from 2021; “Ripcord,” from 2024; and “Bastards,” on shelves this fall—these unnamed narrators share biographical details, enough that they seem to be the same character. Each fled home and school at fifteen, learning from a ragtag, self-designed syllabus of twentieth-century literature, cult cinema, punk rock, and queer art. Each endured stretches of junkiedom and stints in mental facilities, and spent young manhood hustling and hanging out with other sex workers, surviving the most disastrous period of the AIDS epidemic in the United States by becoming precociously steadfast. The narrator of “My Dead Book” recalls, about “social workers, outreach volunteers, and youth counselors” from the era, “They trained us to be vigilant. No exceptions. They saved our lives and they taught us not to trust anyone.” No surprise that he’s held on to his obstinance, as he admits elsewhere: “Negativity is my strength. I’m a man of my word and that word is usually no.”

The aging autodidacts of “Ripcord” and “Bastards” live alone in the Milwaukee area (“My Dead Book” depicts a prior spell in nearby Madison). They pass their free time watching movies, reading, remembering long talks with dead friends, chatting for hours with living ones, and wringing their hands over their chronic insomnia. They lodge their complaints in fragmented prose that splits the difference between comic zingers and poison bonbons. “Some people get the glory. Some people get the glory hole,” “Ripcord” begins. They are resigned to circumstance, their ennui wizened rather than fashionable. In “Bastards,” Lippens’s hero recounts the evening when he stopped trying:

I should make more money. That was the problem. I wasn’t succeeding. My hard work would pay off. And despite changes in names, cities, attitudes, cigarette brands, and drugs, the misbegotten notion of reward and advancement and achievement ruled until the night at the mirror. I burned my life to the ground. Job, apartment, friends, the whole goddamned thing. Afterward, clean and in shock, I saw the face in the mirror again, and I knew I wasn’t going to be a phoenix risen from my own destruction. I was going to lie in my ashes and call it done.

我应该多赚点钱。问题就出在这儿。我没有成功。我的辛勤工作会有回报的。尽管名字、城市、态度、香烟品牌和毒品换了一茬又一茬，那种关于回报、晋升和成就的错误观念一直统治着我，直到镜子前的那个夜晚。我把自己的生活烧了个精光。工作、公寓、朋友，所有该死的一切。之后，清醒过来，惊魂未定，我又看到镜子里那张脸，我知道自己不会成为从自我毁灭中涅槃重生的凤凰。我只会躺在自己的灰烬里，宣告到此为止。

And he does, dispensing with professional and social ambition in a way that feels realistic. After all, most of us, queer or otherwise, make our lives in the rubble of earlier dreams of success, mobility, and, yes, liberation. Aspiring artists submit to the practical necessities of paying off debt. Vacation plans get drowned in work duties. Free spirits become shackled spouses. Lippens forges poetry from disappointment, inhabiting this mood until it becomes familiar, even a source of connection. Curmudgeons, he knows, are relatable, their lives marked by the certainty that no fantasy will ever spring them from the drudgery of survival. His survivors find dignity in the grit, a hard-fought self-love. What looks like acquiescence might actually be resilience.

“My Dead Book,” Lippens’s début novel and the first volume in the triptych, originally came out as a print-on-demand edition from the niche yet mighty press Publication Studio, in its Fellow Travelers series, an imprint dedicated to publishing overlooked writing, much of which deals in queer themes. Since then, the book, which Semiotext(e) reissued in 2024, has developed a word-of-mouth following, owing both to its coruscating prose and its frank view of twenty-first-century L.G.B.T.Q. life in the United States. The tremendous political gains that queer people made during the past two decades have given rise to a false sense of equality, concealing both the scars of history and the fresher wounds inflicted by more novel forms of homophobia. Simultaneously, as many have bemoaned in recent years, America has become too damn expensive.

Lippens’s narrators are products of this status quo. Without a college or high-school degree, their job prospects are limited. The narrator of “Ripcord” cannot pass a credit check. The narrator of “Bastards” does not have a bank account. They hook up but have given up on relationships. When a friend tries to set him up on a date, the narrator of “Ripcord,” who cannot even care for a cactus, declines: “I say I’m retired.” Blurry, half-remembered calamities have forced them to start over from nothing, again and again. The inertia of their lives weighs on them. Now, as the narrator of “My Dead Book” quips, “The only person who would say I’m young is someone else my age.”

Lippens’s début has a more straightforward—less shattered—structure than its sequels, focussing on salad days spent turning tricks and taking drugs. Its tone is elegiac, unsurprising considering that first novels so often explore the accrued pain of the writer’s life to date; still, for Lippens, that date was later than for most authors. “My Dead Book,” published when he was fifty, sports an uncommon polish and perspective for an inaugural effort. As the narrator grieves friends he lost to disease, drugs, and suicide, the book bypasses the bildungsroman to investigate more uncharted territory: the making of a crank. Childhood, he tells us, was a litany of obstacles that had to be overcome, a stretch that was “sad and confusing, and those feelings only grew with time.” The novel’s bleak, lucid tone fit the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was raging when the book first arrived. “Online I’ve seen friends lament their shut-in status and cabin fever, making jokes about The Shining,” its narrator reflects, comparing the isolation of an Upper Midwest winter to his own penchant for solitude. “I’m not about to tell anyone that often days, sometimes weeks, pass without me going outside.”

“Ripcord” is an arch, complex successor and in many respects a more impressive accomplishment—partly because it departs from its predecessor’s most evident influence, Gus Van Sant’s 1991 film, “My Own Private Idaho.” This Shakespearean tragedy of sex work courses through “My Dead Book” and Lippens’s plaintive evocations of the camaradarie and cavorting of hustlers in the eighties and nineties. “Ripcord” keeps us for the most part in a contemporary moment, a difficult shift that Lippens manages nimbly. He amps up the language, building an environment from his narrator’s shtick, a prosodic jungle gym of jokes, derision, self-deprecation, and asides about old Hollywood starlets, experimental writers, and outré musicians. Instead of burying bourgeois culture beneath the protagonist’s punky youth, “Ripcord” contends with it. All the narrator’s capacity for deflection comes into play as he deals with the humdrum present, the reality that nothing will change—certainly not himself.

Lippens picks the right subject to explore this midlife immovability: sex. For his narrator, promiscuity is a respite and a diversion, never a tool to open possibilities for the future, not even when he gets close to someone who makes him briefly engage in “romantic delusions.” This lover, Dustin, is younger and married. He misses the narrator’s conversational reference to the actor Angie Dickinson and dislikes one of his favorite novels because it lacks “redemption.” Yet they have a dynamic that tempts the narrator to lower his defenses, until Dustin breaks things off because his husband reads their texts.

The protagonist reacts to the fissure with a self-lacerating wit that can’t hide an underlying egotism. “I am a cliché. An older man having a nonaffair with a younger man. A lonely man in a lousy room saying tired words,” he disparages himself. His pride may be bruised, but, even during a vulnerable moment, it offers a kind of fortitude. Describing his abjection fuels his sense of superiority over others and his own circumstances. “They don’t understand when I say I’m a piece of shit, I mean they are pieces of shit too,” he says of acquaintances who fail to appreciate his self-effacing humor. “I’m using myself as the stool sample for humanity.”

Lippens’s punch lines are unstoppable, his narrators like a tawdry standup comedian going whole hog in an empty theatre. “Bastards” is a meditation on performance as the self-aware heart of the gay working class. The book begins with the narrator, who has recently emerged from a psychiatric hold, rhinestoning the dress of a drag-queen friend—named Grace Period—in the middle of the night. This, he informs us, is his own grace period from the various types of social performance that subsistence demands of him: “The hours between midnight and dawn are best because I don’t have to stay in character.”

To lose character means, among other things, to let his stiff upper lip loosen, to grow morose about ghosts. “Bastards” perseverates over one friend in particular, Rudy, an older gay man with an acidic outlook to match the narrator’s own. Recollections of Rudy reappear throughout, accompanied by a simultaneous thrill and annoyance with his rambling opinions—Rudy, too, could banter like there was always a camera on him. His prickliness molded the narrator, who was a teen-ager when they met. “Rudy was first chair in the mental peanut gallery of faces I pictured observing my life. I measured my actions in his imagined reactions. I saw the world in particular lights—Rudy-worthy details popped—so I could report back to him, a double agent.”

Both men “understood the obituarist’s tally and the gossip’s snark,” a useful dichotomy for Lippens’s trilogy. If “My Dead Book” is a collective eulogy and “Ripcord” a sardonic pillow book, “Bastards” merges these forms, spangling self-mockery across its surface as a survival mechanism and a means of fabricating delight.

Lippens’s characters bear an outspoken contempt for so many aspects of contemporary gay life—the drag-brunch fad, for instance, which the aforementioned Grace Period regards as inferior to the plucky drag scene of the eighties or nineties. Their disdain, though, is bespoke and self-protective, fanged yet functionally harmless. These are outsiders asserting the validity of a history that is always being forgotten.

In spite of their occasional snobbishness, they refuse America’s truly destructive snobberies—the supreme regard accorded to money and material success, coupledom (rather than singledom), owning property (instead of renting it)—and lay bare how these values can feel inescapable even within oppressed microcosms like the queer community. The trilogy rebuffs the primacy of coastal metropolises and prestigious jobs, the sort of hierarchies the narrator of “Bastards” scorns as “status fetishes.” Lippens denies the premium that gay-male culture places on youth and masculinity. After an encounter with a man who insults him for not being butch enough, the narrator of “Ripcord” goes back on the app where they met: “I changed my profile to: 5”7’ fem with the face of an embittered sea captain, the voice of a pissed off fey concierge, and a body like an unmade bed.” The narrator of “Bastards” rues to a pal at a catering gig, “Last few years my close friends have winnowed to other effeminate gay men our age.” He doesn’t resent his friends or the intimacy of his circle, but he begrudges the normativity that has all but forced him into a narrow milieu.

The issue, “Bastards” indicates, is one of class. The prejudices of a superficial society obsessed with social position nag at these books. Lippens is too much an aesthete, too slyly capable with surfaces, to ever use the term “classism.” His trilogy is a diagnosis dressed up in a rhinestone gown, shining brightly before a trick of the light reveals the rot underneath. ♦