Title:: [[The Future Was Color]] Authors:: [[Patrick Nathan]] Tags:: #fiction Read:: [[2024-06-09]] Instagram :: https://www.instagram.com/jeronimo_ficus/p/C8C7CWMPvC2/ ## Editions - Edition:: [[Counterpoint]], First Edition, 2024 - Original Copyright:: 2024 - Pages:: 224 ## Purchase * Bookshop.org:: https://bookshop.org/a/94437/9781640096240 ## Annotations Every moment in recent human history is imbued with doom and gloom, injustices, and hopelessness. Something that looms large over the consciousness of people, suffocating hope for the future. The new human condition!  From the vantage of the now, many of these things can look exaggerated or even quaint. But too often it’s something real and worse, precipitated by seemingly immovable political and social systems that marginalize and threaten swaths of the population for how they look, what they believe, or who they love. The Future Was Color is set in the latter category; 1950s America at the height of Communist witch hunts and the dawning awareness of the possibility of nuclear annihilation. These kinds of existential anxieties tend to lead us to seek out coping mechanisms of the physical, pleasurable variety like substances or bodies. But for many of Nathan’s characters — closeted gay men with careers — there’s the added threat and worry of being blacklisted, arrested, and publicly shamed for loving and coping a particular way.  It’s this last aspect of TFWC I found so compelling because compared with all of the existential dread and political insanity of that era that has metastasized through to today, it arguably feels like the only one that has gotten better. For example, there’s a scene in the novel where a young gay man is in tears because he’s had the opportunity to live and love freely in a way that was “better than he ever dreamed was possible.” Today we live in a world where if that young man were real, he would be alive and a witness to progress that once felt unthinkable in his own lifetime. That progress hasn’t been perfect, and it’s not yet complete, but it is very real. It makes TFWC a subversively hopeful novel in a way I didn’t expect.