onette's first novel, Taking Care of Mrs Carroll (1978), was written while he was still living on the east coast, but its setting was inspired by visiting Laguna Beach, south of Los Angeles, a longtime bohemian and gay getaway. The zany novel does something new in gay literature. It assumes the characters have come out. It is an exploration of how gay men might create their lives together and with others, including in this instance an aging lesbian movie star, Madeleine Cosquer, based on Marlene Dietrich. Toward the end of the novel, the protagonist notes what critic David Román has termed the epiphany of the novel: "I gave up the past I wanted to invent all along with the one I spent my life burying." This was a lesson that Monette himself was learning as he and Horwitz made the decision to move from Boston to Los Angeles.

The manuscripts of the novel seem to have been lost when Horwitz and Monette moved. Only the last page of the holograph draft was transferred in the papers at UCLA. On this only extant leaf, the working out of the conclusion of the novel is apparent. The final paragraphs are in the center of the page. After the protagonist states he has been changed by the events of the novel, he questions Madeleine about her long life and experience as an actress. Her answer is rousing and ends the novel with one word gay men are so often parodied for using: "'Fabulous,' she said.

Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll was published in 1978, the annus mirabilis of emerging gay literature. Edmund White published his third novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, with an openly homoerotic dust jacket, Larry Kramer published his satire, Faggots, and Andrew Holleran his elegiac novel, Dancer from the Dance, the gay disco age's anthem, as works of F. Scott Fitzgerald had been for the Jazz Age.

Mrs. Carroll was published when he was living in Los Angeles and received good press but has been lost in the history of these novels published by east coast writers. He hoped it would have an impact because of what he thought was for then an unusual point of view: "I take it absolutely for granted that gay people can make joyful, coherent lives."

If Monette had been slow to come out of the closet, he had been making various influential friends during those years that the gay community and gay and lesbian literature and politics were also coming out of the closet. Friends such as Craig Rowland, writing for community gay and lesbian newspapers, reviewed his work. Monette was on the cover of Boston's Gay Community News in 1978. The first national gay news magazine was The Advocate, established in Los Angeles in 1967. Its reviewer, Richard Hall, was the most prominent for gay books at that time, and he wrote a rave review. The novel was also reviewed by Jim Kepner, perhaps the first "gay journalist," having worked on ONE magazine in Los Angeles since the early 1950s. Published elsewhere were After Dark, the arts and entertainment "gay" journal (it never touted itself as such, remaining in the closet itself), and Blueboy, the "gay male lifestyle" and erotica journal. Monette's novels benefited from these publishing firsts. Excerpts of both Mrs. Carroll and The Gold Diggers appeared in Blueboy with illustrations by George Stavrinos, and an After Dark article asked, was Monette "Proust on the Pacific?"

The novel also received good reviews in mainstream journals, but Monette faulted the staid Little Brown which had published his poems: "First novels don't get much promotion and most publishers don't know how to promote a gay novel anyway." The dust jacket photograph was taken by Horwitz, making the novel a felicitous collaboration. The cover is a striking graphic but not particularly gay in its appeal. The 1979 paperback reprint by Avon was over the top gay for its day, showing two men kissing in an uncredited drawing which seems to be by Stravrinos.

Even as Monette gave interviews to publicize Mrs. Carroll, he was moving further away from poetry: "I became frustrated . with this myth of myself that my poetry created. I was good at it and did good work. But the older I got the more my being Gay was central to who I was, and I had to find a way to let that be what my writing was too. As I began to come out, I started a series of poems. They were long dramatic monologues. .One was an encounter on a transcontinental train between Noël Coward and Marlene Dietrich." His attendance as a student at the gay playwright's play had been one impetus for these poems.

The manuscripts for the books' individual poems are visually fascinating, written with much revision in inks of different colors. A whimsical note from Horwitz about copying "Musical Comedy" for Monette gives a glimpse of their domestic life. The poems use Monette's refined camp sensibility even in their choice of an epigraph from Coward's Private Lives:

Holograph manuscript of Mrs. Carroll

Dust jacket of first edition of Mrs. Carroll

Dust jacket photograph of Paul Monette for Mrs. Carroll

Cover of paperback reprint of Mrs. Carroll

Title leaf with epigraph for "Musical Comedy"

First draft manuscript leaf of "Musical Comedy"

Note from Roger Horwitz to Paul Monette about copying "Musical Comedy"

Paul Monette on the cover of Gay Community News