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“The uncanny confidence he took in his own body, his own identity brought into relief my own high school days,” he muses. Meanwhile, Sebastian becomes infatuated with Arthur, seeing in him an out-and-proud teenage version of himself that was sadly foreclosed. None of Oscar’s literary cruising is handled with any nuance or depth at one particularly embarrassing moment, Oscar unironically adopts as his own the motto of one of Sean’s characters, “I vow, henceforth, to live by cock alone,” thus buying into the long-debunked belief that gay sex alone amounts to a radical politics. Oscar, who sees Sean as a living portal to a time when being queer felt “like you were living rebelliously ike you were getting away with murder,” lustily mines Sean’s books for sex scenes that support his own promiscuity. Toying with the evergreen questions of homosexuality - Do I want to be with or be the beloved? - Let’s Get Back to the Party employs the first person, which moves between Oscar’s and Sebastian’s points of views, to examine what the men desire from their relationships. In both cases, the reader gets the sense that Sean and Arthur are supposed to represent something missing from Oscar’s and Sebastian’s respective ideas of gay life. The two solidify their friendship in the school’s gay straight alliance - for which Sebastian serves as the faculty mentor - and eventually start watching movies together after school. Meanwhile, Sebastian develops an intense, and mostly one-sided, relationship with Arthur, a gay high school senior who reminds him of a boy in a Caravaggio painting. Oscar and Sean strike up an unlikely friendship, keeping in touch via email exchanges, before meeting in person when Sean returns to town. Stood up by “A” at a bar, Oscar is messaged on Cruze by Sean Stokes, a writer famous for his autobiographical novels depicting pre-AIDS gay male promiscuity, a fictionalized (and slightly less horny) version of Edmund White. Shortly after their run-in at the wedding, Oscar and Sebastian enter strikingly parallel intergenerational relationships, the details of which make up the core of the book. A book ostensibly about contemporary gay life, Let’s Get Back to the Party’s opening decision to jam its characters into outdated and mutually exclusive gay roles - instead of exploring the overlap between them - sets up the book for an inevitable failure. Not even 20 pages into the novel, the friends establish themselves as the dueling opposites of a well-trodden gay male cultural dyad: Oscar is the queer anti-assimilationist preoccupied solely with sex, and Sebastian the homonormative gay who just wants to settle down with Mr. Late in the night, when the two eventually do speak, Sebastian’s hope for a meaningful reunion is dashed as Oscar appears more preoccupied with arranging his hookup than catching up. The guest of one of his straight colleagues, he spends the evening wallowing in the ruins of his domestic bliss and attempting to catch Oscar’s attention. To honor his political commitments, he devotes the evening to planning a hookup on Cruze (the book’s Grindr equivalent) with a college freshman named “A.” In contrast, Sebastian, an AP Art History teacher recently dumped by his boyfriend, is a former political canvasser for the legalization of gay marriage. Oscar, who feels that gay marriage is an assimilationist sellout, is employed by one of the grooms. Let’s Get Back to the Party opens at a gay wedding, several weeks after the Obergefell decision, at which Oscar and Sebastian are both in begrudging attendance. Set between the Supreme Court’s 2015 legalization of gay marriage and the 2016 massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the novel follows Oscar and Sebastian, two former childhood friends, as they reconnect as adults navigating gay life in Washington, DC. This is the question posed by Zak Salih’s debut novel, Let’s Get Back to the Party.