Uptown

When Stephen Rayfield, a young, gay professor arrives for dinner one evening at the home of his wealthy aunt and uncle, he begins a journey through the social, sexual and political tensions of Charlotte, North Carolina.

As he wades into the choppy waters of Charlotte society, Stephen becomes entangled with his Aunt Missy, a vigorous social climber whose wealth and ambition can never afford quite enough distance from her humble beginnings; Laura Caldwell, Missy's best friend, a woman of good intentions and repressive spirituality; Alice Owens, a physician reluctantly transplanted from San Francisco to Charlotte with her banker husband; and Ben Caldwell, Laura Caldwell's sexually confused eighteen-year-old son.

UPTOWN is a story of pretense and betrayal, a portrait of a New South city whose greatest aspiration is simply to be noticed. Part Edith Wharton and part Sex and the City, it is a reflection on the ways the past will always inform the present, for better or worse, and the fatal tension between what appears on the surface and the reality underneath.Sex and the City, it is a reflection on the ways the past will always inform the present, for better or worse, and the fatal tension between what appears on the surface and the reality underneath.