Truscott Jones

For The Common Good Truscott Jones

Being gay in 2036 America is treacherous: same-sex marriage is again illegal, homosexual teachers are banned from classrooms - merely being outed will ruin your social responsibility score, your career, and probably your life. But that's not enough, according to the Reverend Jimmy Goodfellow and his Christian Kingdom. For him, only Project Exodus, and its fabricated threat of a mutated AIDS pandemic, can purge the homosexual menace once and for all.

Telegenic young senator Chaise Landon is anointed by Goodfellow and the three leaders of the nation's mega-corporations, an alliance known as "the Quad," to become the next President of the United States. Fearing that boiling resentment over both inequality and faded opportunity will imperil their tightly controlled surveillance state, the Quad has turned to Landon as the kinder, more reasonable façade they need to maintain a grip on power.

There's just one problem - none of them knows Landon himself is gay.

When Exodus launches, U. S. troops force a million gay Americans into detention camps. Second Amendment militias help with the round-up and patrol the streets. And in response, illegal protests fill town squares across the land.

Meanwhile, Landon, his nomination by the ruling Republican Party firmly in hand, blazes his own path on the campaign trail, imploring his countrymen to reject hatred and embrace hope.

Will Chaise's optimism prevail in a society paralyzed by fear? When the Quad learns Landon is gay, how do they stop the new threat posed by their ill-chosen political savior? Will the gay underground, which doesn't yet know the senator's true self, stop him even before the Quad? And can anyone undo Reverend Goodfellow's maniacal project?

The choices are about more than simply power itself, more than the future of the nation - they are about what truly is the common good. And for many, the outcome is a matter of life and death itself.

Using his experience with presidential campaigns, as a debate partner and surrogate speaker for a U. S. senator, as a health care attorney, and as a gay man, Truscott Jones probes the homosexual experience, beyond romance, to the struggles, uncertainties and fears of simply being gay in a country of fluctuating acceptance - exploring what grows in the cultural petri dish of an "Us" versus "Them" society.