Johnny Diaz: from 'The Real World' to "Boston Boys Club"...

So I'm tidying up the desk in my home office (a scary task) and I find the advance copy of "Boston Boys Club" that its author Johnny Diaz sent to me some time ago. I'm planning to finish reading it soon and plan to post a review. Johnny, a writer at The Boston Globe, and I have been exchanging emails here and there over recent months and I love his Beantown Cuban blog. Advocate.com has just posted a pretty cool article on him during which he confesses to experiencing what he calls "first-book jitters."
It's exactly one month before the national release of his debut novel, "Boston Boys Club" and in it, he says he's determined to depict a multifaceted professional Latino who happens to be gay.
"That's one of the reasons why I wanted to write this book." he explains. "Hispanics are always portrayed as either street thugs, cleaning people, or as the gardener. And the Latin gay guys I've seen are always hot, overly sexualized tricks from Miami."

"Boston Boys Club" follows a trio of friends as they search for that perfect guy at an ultrahip boy bar in Boston, the Club Café. While Diaz insists his story is a fictionalized account of his life after moving from Miami to Boston five years ago, the 34-year-old author admits that he intertwines real-life locales (like the Club Café, which is in Boston's South End), events, and yes, people in Boston Boys Club.
"The main character, Tommy Perez, covers Hispanic-related issues at a paper similar to The Boston Globe," he says, adding that his alter ego works at a pub called The Boston Daily. "Tommy lives in Harvard Square, and I used to live near Harvard Square."
To read the complete story, click on Advocate.com.