Let’s get one thing out of the way: I didn’t write Suté and Solitude because I had answers.
I wrote it because I was drowning in questions. About dating. About queerness. About whether emotional intimacy is still possible in a world where most people flirt by reacting to an Instagram story and ghost you faster than their DoorDash order.
This book started as a satire. Then it became a diary. Then it became a slow, painful exorcism of every ugly truth I’d collected about queer dating culture, masculinity, validation, sex, and silence.
And somehow, it still made me laugh.
Because sometimes the only way to survive the absurdity of modern love is to write about it like it’s a comedy.
Suté and Solitude is, at its core, what happens when Sex and the City crashes headfirst into Queer as Folk, but everyone’s too tired to club hop and nobody has healthcare.
Meet Leo: Our Protagonist, Chef, and Occasionally Functional Human
Leo is a queer chef in his 30s—talented, exhausted, and emotionally overdrawn. He opens a high-end Mexican-Cajun restaurant in San Francisco called Suté, pouring everything into it because, well, it’s easier to control the flavor profile of a dish than the chaos of human connection.
He’s sarcastic. He’s guarded. He’s slut-adjacent.
He’s you, if you’ve ever made a spreadsheet to track your hinge dates and still somehow ended up crying into a $17 cocktail.
Leo isn’t looking for love, but he’s desperate for something. And like many of us, he confuses attention for affection, proximity for intimacy, and shared trauma for compatibility.
Why This Book? Why Now?
Because queer dating is wild right now. Not in the “fun, sexy” way. In the “mutually assured destruction disguised as vibes” way.
Modern dating—especially for LGBTQ+ people—comes with a unique set of challenges:
- Emotional unavailability masquerading as liberation
- Performative vulnerability with zero follow-through
- Apps that reduce you to body type, distance, and photo filter
- The pressure to be chill when all you want is to be chosen
- Cis gay men still treating femininity like a moral failure
- People who trauma dump, trauma bond, then disappear faster than bisexuals at Pride once the free drinks run out
We’ve replaced romance with logistics. Intimacy with aesthetics.
And somewhere in the shuffle, a lot of us started feeling… profoundly alone in rooms full of people.
So I Made a Book About It
Suté and Solitude isn’t a morality tale. No one gets a neat happy ending.
But it is honest. It’s about Leo navigating hookup culture, emotional burnout, and the lie that you have to be whole before anyone can love you. (Spoiler: no one’s whole. We’re all missing at least three parts and faking the rest.)
It’s about queer people trying to date while still healing from rejection, from erasure, from churches, from Grindr, from ourselves.
It’s about chosen family that doesn’t always choose back.
About loving your job more than your reflection.
And about the quiet question beneath every joke and hookup:
Is there anyone out there who will stay?
Solitude Isn’t Just a Title. It’s a Symptom.
Leo hides in his work. In his sharpness. In curated outfits and unspoken rules. He can braise anything but can’t say “I need you” without breaking into hives. He’s afraid of being loved wrong—so he’d rather not be loved at all.
And that’s not fiction. That’s real.
So many of us have spent years building beautiful lives and realizing too late that achievement doesn’t cuddle you at night.
Leo’s solitude isn’t romantic. It’s not meditative. It’s lonely, and it’s real, and it’s exactly what I needed to write about. Because I’ve felt it. My friends have felt it. And pretending queer people don’t struggle with that same desperate longing for closeness does us no favors.
If Sex and the City Had to Deal with Ghosting, Therapy, and Trauma Responses…
Imagine Carrie Bradshaw if she’d been raised in a red state, came out late, got ghosted by a TikTok influencer, and wrote essays about being emotionally avoidant instead of shoes. That’s Leo.
Like the queens of Sex and the City, Leo surrounds himself with a cast of chaotic support characters: a nonbinary line cook who reads everyone to filth, a best friend who treats monogamy like a dare, and a string of lovers who are always almost enough.
Like Queer as Folk, the book doesn’t flinch. It gets graphic. Crude. Vulnerable. It’s not sanitized queerness. It’s complicated. Sexy. Shameful. Liberating. And sometimes stupid.
Because love often is.
TL;DR – I Wrote This Because I Was Tired of Pretending We’re Fine
Suté and Solitude is for the ones who are tired of ghosting, but keep swiping.
For the ones who say they’re not looking for anything serious—then sob when they’re alone at brunch.
For the queers who are done with pretending sex means nothing and who still quietly hope it might mean something.
It’s for the soft ones who act hard.
The loud ones who cry in silence.
The funny ones who write books instead of asking to be loved.
I wrote this because I needed to know I wasn’t the only one asking:
What if I’m too tired to fall in love, but too lonely not to try?