Homeward Bound

Young Charles Bairr discovers his sexuality in early twentieth-century Asheville and is soon providing extra services for boarding house residents to help his widowed mother get by.

What he really wants to do in life is write. His talent in play script writing brings him under the influence and control of the bigger-than-life flamboyant playwright and theater huckster Stanford Dane. But it is Charlie’s thinly disguised novels based on his experiences with men in Asheville boarding houses that open his way to New York and a career as a best-selling novelist.

The secret of Charlie’s father’s life and the pull of his own love affair with the mulatto lawyer Abraham Jackson bring Charlie back to Asheville, not to the expected resentment for his treatment of Asheville society in his novels but to acclaim. Both Charlie and Abe are wary of how the still very-Southern city of Asheville would react to their liaison, however, which leads them to live separate public lives while sharing the same bed in an isolated love nest.

Charlie’s past catches up with him and threatens the literary life he has fought so hard to attain, however, when he is pulled back under the fatal influence and control of his first mentor, Stanford Dane.

Inspired by the era and setting of American author Thomas Wolfe, “Homeward Bound” follows an imaginary young man obsessed with writing about his experience of the hidden life of his town.