Loyalty, Love, & Vermouth

Elijah Golden and Justin Monroe are uncle and nephew with eclectic careers, friends, and family in LA, trying to center Black Joy in their lives.Then their worlds turn in ways nobody expects.

Elijah, a dedicated thespian, auditions by day, does theater by night, and works two jobs on weekends. With enough life for three people, he keeps his recently divorced partner Zaire coasting on bliss…until secrets and real-life dramas test their love.

Justin, Elijah’s uncle, is a single father with teenage twins, and a tv journalist who’s been replaced at the anchor desk when new management arrives. No longer in the public eye, living true to his sexuality is something Justin can finally do. Dating and romance—Justin’s ready for fun. Conflicts with fatherhood and career—he’ll have none.

Elijah and Justin seek happily-ever-afters, but are they too busy to notice <i>happy</i> when it’s there?

For 21-year-old gay virgin Gabe Rafferty, the first decade of adulthood is unpredictable and intense. 

Flat broke upon college graduation, Gabe navigates the passage from menial work to globetrotting corporate drudge, then strives for a real chance at professional fulfillment. His journey exploring his sexuality—from inhibited innocence, to first-love crises, to random hookups—doesn’t seem to lead to the more sensual, committed relationships he wants. Then he meets Marty, an African American art student, and Gabe must face his white working-class background and racist father for a chance at true love.

Throughout, he traverses the joys and hazards of loving a headstrong cast of friends, including a lesbian couple, and Candy, a straight female friend whose life intersects with Gabe’s in unexpected ways.

For Gabe, what happens after coming of age and coming out is a scramble to survive first journeys into sex, love, and livelihood.

Andre met his best friend Amy on a night like tonight. The way Amy tells it she had to stop him from climbing over the bar at Aunty Bob’s to punch the bartender, though if you ask Andre he’ll say, “What? That never happened. I don’t even know what you’re saying to me right now.” 

Now Amy is worryingly missing in action, and Andre goes to Aunty Bob’s on a quest to find her. No sooner does he walk in with his depressingly heterosexual date than his best hat is spirited away by a lesbian in the throes of breaking up with her girlfriend. She in turn has it stolen from her when she starts a fight with two twinks at the bar. The hat makes its way around Aunty Bob’s from one head to another, giving glimpses into the dozens of stories playing out at the same time, unaware of each other but colliding in catastrophic ways. Can Andre find Amy before this party devolves into a nightmare of broken hearts, malevolent drag queens, and spontaneous human combustion? Or has it always happened this way, every night, at Aunty Bob’s Quake City Club?

Determined to record every summer day, young history teacher Luke Devlin starts school vacation imagining he’ll describe backcountry adventures in the Rockies and sun-splashed days home in Denver. But all too soon the season veers into crisis, when his older brother faces life-threatening illness and Luke becomes entangled in a love affair that’s as fast-moving and possibly as fatal as his brother’s diagnosis.

As Luke manages the household for his absent parents and struggles with the constant pressure of his unfinished master’s deadline, his fling with a Wyoming rancher grows serious just as his brother’s crisis overwhelms him. Luke’s love of his native ground and his search for romance collide with the hard realities of mortality and loss during an unexpected summer.

When struggling actor Phillip Stalworth breaks up with his girlfriend, he returns home to the Deep South to care for his ailing mother and unexpectedly falls for a local carpenter. Working through his past with his complicated family, some old high school chums, and the desperate characters who grace his hometown, Phillip ultimately finds his own voice as his mother is finally regaining hers.

Already an award-winning film, Counting for Thunder was inspired by writer Phillip Irwin Cooper’s personal experience and, like Augusten Burroughs, covers many of the universal themes of love, life, sex, and death with his own brand of gallows wit. Phillip’s three-year quest is a hero’s journey proving we truly can go home again to learn the lessons we should have mastered the first time around.