American writer Stephen McCauley was BOTD in 1955. Born and raised in Boston, he studied at the University of Vermont, followed by a year at the University of Nice in southern France. After working as a travel agent for many years, he moved to Brooklyn, New York in the 1980s, and enrolled in Columbia University’s writing programme. His 1987 debut novel The Object of My Affection, a dramedy chronicling the friendship between a gay man and his straight girlfriend who raise a child together, was a bestseller, admired for its deft take on bisexuality and positive representations of queer characters. The novel was adapted into a 1998 film of the same name, directed by Nicholas Hytner and starring Jennifer Aniston, Paul Rudd and Nigel Hawthorne, though with a Hollywood ending in which Aniston’s character is partnered with a hot heterosexual policeman. McCauley continued to explore queer reconfigurations of family and intimate relationships in his novels The Easy Way Out, The Man of the House, My Ex-Life and Alternatives to Sex, largely side-stepping the anguished themes of HIV/AIDS, homophobia and family rejection in most gay-themed writing of the period. In the 2000s, his novels True Enough and The Easy Way Out were adapted into the French-language films La Verité ou Presque and L’Art de la fugue, leading to his being made a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. His most recent novel You Only Call When You’re in Trouble, was published in 2024. He lives in Waltham, Massachusetts with his partner, and teaches creative writing at Brandeis University.