The Closeted Life of Claude Hartel

It’s 1998, and Jim Hartel is a seventeen-year-old fake, sucking face with Danielle in his car, while secretly peeking at Dominic’s Marky Mark-sized biceps and Calvin Kleins, dying to be a writer but way too embarrassed. That shit’s for sissies. And that’s not Jim—at least not the Jim he shows the world.

But when he finds a photograph of a great uncle he never knew he had, the mystery of the man’s disappearance is too much to contain, and soon Jim finds himself writing after all: a diary of his search for Claude Hartel.

With his new sorta-friend Angie, a girl with sweaty armpit stains in her Rocky Horror Picture Show t-shirt who wants to jump Jim’s bones, Jim travels to Southern California to find answers. They follow the trail of Claude Hartel’s life—from his incarceration in a mental institution to “treat” his homosexuality, to his stint as a poolboy to the stars, they discover his life and his role in pivotal moments in the gay rights movement.

As they uncover the mystery, learning of Claude Hartel’s extraordinary life from unforgettable strangers, Jim gets uncomfortably close to confronting the truth about himself.

And Jim’s honest and raw diary documents it all.