Let’s Get Back To the Party is a portrait of two strikingly different yet all-too-familiar contemporary gay men. First there’s Sebastion, the quiet high school teacher who develops an increasingly unhealthy obsession with one of his teenage students after being abruptly left by his boyfriend of three years. While the obsession never reaches Lolita-like levels, it does reveal the inherited generational divide that keeps many gay men trapped from true freedom while allowing others to live unencumbered by shame and societal expectations. Then there’s Oscar, handsome, good-looking, and always on the apps scrolling for the next one-night stand. Oscar disgusts at the parade of gay men rushing the alter but is upended by a chance meeting with an older gay writer (think Alan Hollinghurst), whose novels of gratuitous and free-spirited sex in 1970s New York City have earned him a rapt audience. Oscar is faced with his own generational divide, forced to choose between the current march of modern history or the tide of the past that threatens to leave him behind. While the metaphor here can be a bit too literal, and the “will they or won’t they” flirtation between Oscar and Sebastian doesn’t really add up, author Zak Salih offers a grounded and often sobering look at what it means to be a gay man right now. The novel stresses the importance of honoring the past and lives of the gay men of this country -without romancing those lives’ struggles-as well as need to support the next, more hopeful, generation.