No-Accounts – Local Author – Tom Glenn

Description

No-Accounts

Peter, a gay dancer dying of AIDS, thirsts for forgiveness for fatally infecting a young musician. Martin, a straight college professor, grieves over the loss of his favorite student, dead of AIDS. He volunteers to act as a buddy to an AIDS patient and is assigned Peter. When they discover that Peter infected Martin’s student, both are forced to rethink their life views. No-Accounts is a story of two men, one gay, one straight, who learn from one another how to become men by accepting loss, including, in the end, life itself.

Tom Glenn has worked as an intelligence operative, a musician, a linguist (seven languages), a cryptologist, a government executive, a caregiver for the dying, a leadership coach, and, always, a writer. Many of his prize-winning short stories (seventeen in print) came from the better part of thirteen years he shuttled between the U.S. and Vietnam as an undercover NSA operative supporting army and Marine units in combat before escaping under fire when Saigon fell.

With a BA in Music, a master’s in Government, and a doctorate in Public Administration, he toured the country lecturing on leadership and management, trained federal executives, and was the Dean of the Management Department at the National Cryptologic School.

Maryland Public Television interviewed him and 15 others in its salute to Vietnam vets aired in May 2016, and his memoir article on the fall of Saigon has been published by Studies in Intelligence and reprinted in the Atticus Review. In late 2017, the New York Times published his story on his role in the 1967 battle of Dak To in Vietnam’s central highlands. His writing is haunted by his five years of work with AIDS patients, two years of helping the homeless, seven years of caring for the dying in the hospice system, and Post-Traumatic Stress Injury, a consequence of his time in Vietnam. These days he is a reviewer for The Washington Independent Review of Books and the Internet Review of Books. Adelaide Books of New York will bring out his latest novel, Secretocracy, and his short-story collection, Coming to Terms, in early 2020.