Songs for the New Depression

In his debut novel, Songs for the New Depression (2011), theater director and AIDS-education advocate Kergan Edwards-Stout draws on personal experience caring for a partner with AIDS to paint a portrait of a middle-aged gay man dying from the disease and reflecting back on his life. The novel is divided into three parts, each a snapshot of the protagonist at an important time in his life: first, his experiences as a 40-something adult in 1995; second, his wild days of sexual freedom in the 1980s; and last, his formative teenage years, a time that shaped much of his personality. Praised for its humor, pathos, and the unfolding of innermost recesses that takes place almost in opposition to the first-person narration’s wry, mocking attitude, the novel won the Indie Book Award in the LGBTQ category.

In the first section of the novel, we meet Gabe Travers, our sarcastic, irrepressible narrator who is about to die of AIDS. Just after this death occurs, the narrator’s posthumous consciousness flashes back to 1995—the time when the HIV virus was first starting to make incursions into his health. The adult Gabe we see at this point is caustic, charming, and smart—but also haunted by his past choices, especially his reckless sexual escapades in the 1980s, the period when he contracted HIV.

Gabe’s end of life is full of grace notes. Using his viatical insurance buyout—the proceeds of having sold his life insurance below its value because of his terminal illness—he goes to Paris with Jon, his incredibly loving and kind boyfriend. Gabe met Jon while working at an AIDS support agency, and Jon’s openhearted and caretaking nature is the antithesis to Gabe’s guarded, cynical self. Nevertheless, their relationship is deeply felt and passionately consummated through safe sex. Gabe is thrilled to show Jon Paris, Gabe’s favorite place on earth.



During this period in his life, Gabe reckons with the distance between the person he is and the person he aspires to be. He castigates himself for his shallowness and obsession with outward appearance, for his judgmental approach—but at the same time, acknowledges that those qualities buttress the things he is proud of, such as his stylishness and cultured wit, his sense of being superior to those around him. When Gabe returns from Paris and visits his mother, Gloria, we see how much her preoccupation with image has rubbed off on him—the value he places on looks and status above all is a product of his upbringing.

Now, however, his mother has mellowed into a new freedom of her own. Now that Gabe’s father, Lennie, is no longer in the picture, his mother has come out and married—her wife is Pastor Sally, a folksy minister whom Gabe initially dismisses as a “hick,” but whose love of country music jibes well with Gabe’s own deep reverence for Bette Midler (the novel’s title comes from one of her albums). Eventually, Gabe regrets writing her off so hastily—a moment where he can overcome those aspects of his personality that he ruminates about.

When the narrative jumps backward again, we see Gabe before Jon and before the virus as a carefree man lustfully making his way through West Hollywood while working for Amblin Entertainment. As we watch Gabe traipse around the city with his lifelong best friend, Clare, whom he by turns infuriates and enraptures, we recognize that Gabe is using promiscuity as a replacement for love. Gabe is searching for the one that got away—his youthful boyfriend, Keith, the one true love of Gabe’s life so far. In every other man, Gabe wants to find a piece of Keith, whom he loved and lost in high school. Eventually, he does reconnect with Keith, but the connection is no longer the same. Not only that, Keith is the man who ends up infecting Gabe with HIV.



Jumping back even further into Gabe’s past, the third part of the novel describes his high school days in Northridge, California, in 1976. There, he first meets and connects with Clare. He also falls in love with Keith, a boy he idolizes and with whom he imagines spending his life. Keith is compassionate and capable of seeing the good parts of Gabe no matter how much self-hatred Gabe has piled on top that goodness. Keith’s innate lack of judgment allows Gabe to open completely, sharing with Keith the details of a deeply traumatic event that he hasn’t told anyone else about: a vicious episode of gay-bashing and humiliation that Gabe suffered at the hands of classmates. When we learn about what Gabe underwent, we can see the seeds of the man he would eventually become—untrusting, difficult to connect to, and deeply suspicious of the motives of those he meets.

The novel’s layered approach to dissecting Gabe received praise from readers and critics alike. In the words of the Kirkus Review, Edwards-Stout “excels at characterization, cleverly arming his plucky protagonist with a contagious combination of wit and droll self-deprecation. … Edwards-Stout infuses reality and hopefulness into a bittersweet story about compassion and personal growth.”