What One Memoir Reveals About a Vanishing Era of Gay Life
David Stern’s ‘Elevator Boy’, and how writing the novelistic memoir changed his life
Amid a cacophony of chaos and confusion as politics upends everything we knew about the American Dream, David Stern plants an iron flag of defiance to let future LGBTQ+ voyagers know, “We were here – and this is what happened.”
Once upon a time, in the not-so-distant past, David was the co-publisher with the late Mark Hundahl of IN Los Angeles and Frontiers magazines. Full disclosure: I was a reporter and news editor for both when they were the publications “of record” for the LGBTQ+ community in Southern California.
I worked with David and thought I knew him fairly well. But I did not know he could write a book like Elevator Boy. I honestly did not know he could write such a detail-rich, emotion-provoking, at times stream-of-conscious novelistic memoir that reads like a modern gay version of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, with flashes of John Rechy’s City of Night serving as illuminated cultural sign posts along the way.
In our Zoom interview, David says he thought about writing the book to help deter young gay men from thoughts of suicide – as he had experienced. But thinking about writing and actually doing it was a long hard climb out of a very dark pit into which he had fallen after losing his “Frontiers” identity.
“What happened to me when I lost my career so suddenly was that all of a sudden I was this 16-year old kid,” David says. “So 10 years ago, I'm in my mid- fifties and all of a sudden, I'm not the publisher of the magazine, I don't know who I am without that identity. And I reverted back to the 16-year-old kid that ran away from home and lived on the streets in Hollywood.”
He was aghast to find that the rate of LGBTQ+ homeless youth is remarkably as high now as during his “runaway” years more than 40 years ago.
“Elevator Boy” became one of three inner identities or “shadow selves” that coaxed his survival and development.
“Elevator Boy - my biggest shame and my biggest survival skill,” he says, a lifelong journal writer. “When I was just shy of 16 years old, May 25 1976, my dad was on his way to work. And there was a malfunctioning elevator in the lobby of his building. And he perished, as in he fell down the elevator shaft and he died.
“He had let me know, in his own way, that he knew that I was gay. And he let me know that about a week and a half before that incident happened. And we never discussed it. And I had all this insane amount of guilt when my dad died that he was so sad, sidetracked by me, that he wasn't watching where he was going. I still live with a fragment of that always in my brain,” David says.
“Everybody's got a story. But if I could overcome what I've overcome in my life and the whole road…all this stuff with AIDS and that whole area, and can come through all of that and suicide attempts and move on to publish what I believe were very, very successful publications for the gay community,” David says, “then anybody can turn their life around.
“My whole message is ‘tragedy and the triumph.’ I don't know what makes an individual ready to receive or be open enough to allow the information to be processed so that the trauma can dispense once and for all,” David says. “I have chronic kidney disease and my kidneys have been hovering at around eGFR 30%. They were as low as 24. That's the rate your kidneys filter - you want them filtering high so your body functions. With this last rewriting of the book from February to now, my kidneys at last blood test were 47%.
“I firmly, with all of my heart - because I've done everything, the diet, you name it for the kidneys and diabetes, I've tried it - I really believe that releasing that last huge layer of emotional burden did something to me spiritually, metaphysically, however you want to word that. All I know is the labs don't lie. And my kidneys, as of a couple of weeks ago, are 47%.... It is a whole new life.”
In his book and in our interview, David talks about the machinations behind In Los Angeles Magazine and Frontiers Magazine, both of which our LGBTQ+ community much needed at a time when we were ignored and often maligned by mainstream media.
So we talked a little about the concerted effort by the Trump administration to erase us, our progress, our history and any identity, expression and individual and collective freedom and equality we choose to seek.
“There is a huge effort taking place to erase us,” says David Stern. “We will not be erased. And that starts with my voice and my project, because I don't know where else to start it with….So I hope people will get my intention of the book and enjoy the read.”
Elevator Boy - An Otherworldly Memoir is now on pre-sale on Amazon (read on Kindle for free now) and Barnes and Nobles with official paperback launch on Oct. 21, 2025.