Kenyon does a nice job recreating the pre-Stonewall milieu and there are some nice touches to the story.

There has been a much-deserved revision of Stonewall and pre-Stonewall history in recent years, shifting focus from white men to people of color - and in particular, trans people of color - who bore the brunt of police violence and who played an outsized role in activist circles. The decision he makes will ricochet destructively through lives and decades until―in another time, another city; in Paris, 2003―Raymond’s son Joe finally meets Joey.What continues for the rest of the 300 plus pages of this debut novel has got to be the most beautifully written account of a 21 year old mans 'Sexual Awakenings' as I have ever read.

It is against this recontextualization that Sam Kenyon has written his debut novel, I am not Raymond Wallace, a story about closeted cis men set largely in 1963.Raymond Wallace, a recent graduate of Cambridge of age 21, arrives in NYC in the summer of 1963 for a 3-month internship with the NY Times. When Raymond takes this 'job' and is told that he needs more 'appropriate for the times' clothing to fit in to the group that he is going to be doing undercover writing for; he has no idea that he is going to fall in love whole heartedly for the first time in his life with the young man at the clothier. Raymond is assigned to Doty, a journalist who has piece planned on the ‘overt homosexuality’ which apparently has New York in its grip. It’s shocking to remember that Raymond had come from a country four years away from decriminalising his sexuality, and, of course, it would be many more years before same sex relationships could be both celebrated and recognised in law. The Raymond's controlling mother arrives to spend a couple of days with him at the end of his internship and accompany him home.