Bill Leubrie

Learning to Love It Bill Leubrie

Herbie Manning, a restless, frustrated and lonely gay man approaching middle age, finds an actual genie in a bottle. The djinn must offer him any wish he cares to name. Herbie does not think small. He asks for a whole new life: a splendid new body and a fresh start in the world unencumbered by past mistakes. Yet he cannot resist making one more. In the time between deciding on his wish and its fulfillment, he provides for his financial future by committing an "impossible" theft, secure, he thinks, in the knowledge that, in his new body, he will be able to disappear without trace. One set of problems involves the feckless investigator sent to track him. Greg Whitbread is a deeply closeted, self-repressed homosexual virgin chosen for the job on the basis of his previous acquaintance with and well-known loathing of Herbie. This loathing has strong overtones of closet-queer paranoia, and has caused him to persecute Herbie in the past. His investigation soon focuses on a person of interest, obviously Herbie, though he cannot know that. He becomes hopelessly besotted with Herbie's outwardly lovely new persona, creating for each a novel situation further complicated by the supernatural world, in which a slip in the wording of Herbie's request has permanently enmeshed Herbie against both his and its wishes.