Stories

In 1972, Jeff attended a summer science program, where he fell in love. Now, nearly fifty years later, he's a distinguished astrophysicist with a Nobel Prize and an extensive lecture circuit. Imagine his surprise when he gives a talk at Stuyvesant High School in New York, and is asked a question by a boy in the audience who looks exactly like his first love.

Asher White was everything Clarke hated. He was half-black and half-Asian, and out and proud. But when Asher actually managed to beat Clarke in wrestling, he just snapped and punched Asher out. Clarke knew this was it. He'd worked so hard to get into New York's elite Stuyvesant High School and now it would be for naught. Grasping at straws, he tells the vice-principle the one secret not even he knows he has. With the help of a new friend, he is forced to confront years of abuse he has suffered at home. After all, bullying starts in the home, and it must end in the home.

Seth and Asher are two boys growing up on New York's Lower East Side. Nearly finished with their first year at Stuyvesant, one of New York's elite public specialty high schools, they’ve become inseparable as boyfriends. Asher dreams of opening a restaurant and looks forward to helping his father open a new Cajun place. As the son of a politician, Seth helps to find a prize location for the restaurant nearby that they can afford. When tragedy strikes and faced with the possibility of it closing before it even opens, the young teens take over and manage the restaurant by themselves.

Jake and Ken are getting married, and then they're taking their sons, Roger and Kyle, on a ten-week European vacation. Francis (Freck), Kyle's boyfriend, will be going with them, but he has a history that includes drugs and a suicide attempt when he was only eleven. On top of that, Freck, a freckle-faced redhead who was raised Catholic, now has a Jewish boyfriend and has come to realize that he's one-quarter Jewish. Naturally, he's curious about what it all means. But what will happen when his life hits a minor bump in the road?

Like the namesake movie released in 2000, which is set in LA, What's Cooking (in NYC) explores the lives of four families as they make preparations for the Thanksgiving holiday. As with the movie, there is much unexpected drama, but with the added wrinkle that all four families, who are well-known to NYC Holidays readers, are waiting for loved ones to arrive on the same flight from California. When a glitch in Air Traffic Control occurs, anything can happen.

Freck and Kyle are both seniors and they’re out and proud. They’re also protégées, as Kyle just turned eleven and Freck is about to turn thirteen, on the day after Christmas. Kyle wants to get his boyfriend something special, but the watch Freck likes is way out of Kyle’s price range. Maybe with help from friends and family, and with a lot of self-sacrifice, he can swing it, but they’ll both learn the greatest gift is one they already share - the love of family.

Seth Moore grew up on New York’s Lower East side, the son of a New York State assemblyman. He loved his dad and admired his dedication, but then his dad was arrested on federal charges of corruption. It couldn’t be! When the Feds moved against his boyfriend’s family and seized their restaurants, their only means of support, something had to be done. Would Seth’s dad cop a plea to insider trading and go prison for a crime he didn’t commit, all for the sake of his son and the boy he loved?

Last spring, Jeff was reunited with his long lost love, whom he last saw nearly fifty years ago, when they were both in their teens. Abandoning a life in California and moving in with Paul in New York City, merging two lifetimes into a 3-bedroom prewar apartment proved to be more difficult than either of them imagined. Things come to a head when they can’t agree on how to renovate the kitchen. Leave it to Paul’s grandson, Seth, to come to the rescue with a surprise plan, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

When Josh and his sisters move from the Brooklyn neighborhood of Manhattan Beach to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, he quickly befriends a group of gay kids that go to Stuyvesant High School, where he's a freshman. His youngest sister, Robin, forges her own relationships with fellow students at the Salk School for Science. In the meantime Freck's mother attempts to make amends. All look forward to the festivals of Passover and Easter, but then a global Pandemic forces a change of plans.

For the residents of New York City, the Covid-19 pandemic took most by surprise. Schools closed and teens and preteens, used to seeing each other everyday, found themselves instead with parents and siblings. Online conferencing was a poor substitute for human touch and nothing could replace the kiss of a boyfriend or girlfriend.

Dave had enough to worry about with his mother being as a nurse, but when she was admitted to the ICU at Bellevue, his uncles from Seattle and his boyfriend became his lifeline. He couldn't help but wonder, though, what would become of him if she didn't make it.