The Baron Files

a novel for young adults
by Clayton Bess

Read The Baron Files on the Web.

So ill that I thought I was dying just before my 70th birthday, I began putting all of my writings onto the World Wide Web so that they would be accessible to anyone caring to look for them.

That caused me to pull out the old 1979 typescript of THE BARON FILES which I had kept literally in the closet —an irony not lost upon me — and begin what I thought at first would be the laborious task of retyping the entire novel in order to get it into electronic format. In fact, it was a tremendous joy. I immediately found myself gripped by the characters and events of the novel, all over again in love with it.

I had put the novel away because the AIDS epidemic had sprung upon the world in the early 80s. In order to get the book published I would have to alter it radically in ways that I could not bear; so I shelved it.

Now, coming into 2015, the country and indeed much of the civilized world had changed attitudes enormously in regard to gay people with the words "gay marriage" and "marriage equality" in the news every day, and more and more gay people coming out of the closet. I realized The Baron Files had become a period piece, solidly wedged in the late 70s, just a few years after first the American Psychiatric Association then the American Psychological Association had voted to remove homosexuality from their lists of "mental disorders", yet just before HIV became prevalent.

John Baron's struggles in the Youth Authority Institution in which he was locked and tormented are no less real in 2015 in the bullying, blustering macho sectors of our society, but there is an incredibly fast-developing acceptance and appreciation for a young, proud gay person. To discover such a robust personality was actually created in the late 70s should come as a big, welcome surprise to modern readers.

So read and enjoy The Baron Files on the Web.