Luca Ferraro

The Boy in the Closet

At thirteen, he believes being discovered would be worse than being alone.

The closet is where he goes to feel safe. Outside it, his father drinks, dinner can turn violent, and being gay seems like a secret that could cost him everyone he loves.

Yet there is Mumma, his great-grandmother, who makes room for him in her kitchen without asking him to become someone else. There is a teacher who recognises his mind. And eventually there is a young man, a bag of M&Ms, and an evening beneath the stars that opens a future he had scarcely dared to imagine.

He becomes an architect. Builds a life with a man he loves. Learns to look successful even when he is coming apart.

By the time he enters treatment, he has spent decades keeping people from seeing him clearly. Now he must speak in a room full of strangers—and trust that someone might stay after hearing the truth.

With irreverent humor and tenderness rooted in ordinary acts of care, The Boy in the Closet follows a gay man from childhood secrecy toward the possibility of belonging without disguise. Through it all, the boy he once was is still waiting for him to come back.

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Tomorrow If You Are Free

In the summer of 1962, Peter Bell keeps waiting for a bus he doesn’t need to catch. Daniel Mercer keeps hoping he will.

They are sixteen, working at a bathing lake in Surrey. Daniel draws buildings and worries about getting things wrong. Peter makes things with his hands and finds Daniel considerably funnier than Daniel intends. A picnic requires borrowed china. Their first kiss requires a second attempt. Seeing each other again requires an excuse.

Neither knows how to ask for the life he wants.

Over the next six decades, they begin to build it: a cramped flat, a table crowded with friends, rings exchanged in a garden before their promises have any standing in law. They discover how much happiness a home can hold—and how easily one man’s plans can leave the other without a say.

As ambition pulls them in different directions and illness takes people they love, staying together asks more of them than either understood at sixteen.

Tender, funny, and attentive to the pleasures of a shared life, Tomorrow If You Are Free follows two men who can still hurt each other, still surprise each other, and still think of something worth coming home to tell.

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The Other Side of the River

The injured man asks Rafael Salazar for two things: help leaving the family business, and a promise not to tell Rafael’s father.

Rafael wants to believe he can arrange both.

His family’s money has given him a comfortable life on either side of the Texas–Mexico border. He knows the companies, approves the accounts, and has learned how much can be left unspoken. Now someone he knows is bleeding, and the familiar explanations no longer hold.

At the hospital, Rafael encounters Gabriel Reyes, a doctor he knew when they were young. Their attraction grows through remembered jokes, messages after midnight, and evenings Rafael wants to keep for himself. But Gabriel’s father is the DEA agent investigating the Salazars.

For Rafael, telling Gabriel the truth means revealing his own part in the business. For Gabriel, loving Rafael means facing questions about his father’s investigation that loyalty has kept him from asking.

As the danger reaches beyond the family, silence becomes another decision with victims. Rafael must decide what he is prepared to surrender—and whether he can tell the man he loves everything, knowing Gabriel may have reason to walk away.

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Eh? Broken English: The Adventures of Reek-ee the Menace

Growing up gay in an Italian-American family, Reek-ee learns that he can make people laugh more easily than he can tell them who he loves.

He has a talent for turning ordinary life into an incident. Household equipment becomes an opportunity. Instructions are open to interpretation. His family supplies enough material for a lifetime, along with firm opinions about how that lifetime should be lived. Years later, at his sister’s wedding, he is expected to bring a woman so nobody has to acknowledge the man he loves.

Adulthood brings love, ambition, and a long relationship he cannot keep from unraveling. As addiction takes hold, his wit remains sharp enough to explain almost anything away. Then he enters treatment, looks around the room, and decides these are not his people. Recovery begins to challenge that certainty.

With irreverent humor and an eye for the absurd, LGBTQIA+ author Luca Ferraro follows one gay man through the trouble he causes, the losses he cannot joke away, and the daily work of beginning again. Love returns with Lorenzo, who takes an admiring look at a red Porsche as sufficient reason to buy it.

But when their wedding arrives, nine seats reserved for family stand empty. Reek-ee has spent years making himself easier for other people to accept. How much of his happiness will he keep asking them to approve?

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