Characters
- Nathan: a 42-year-old widowed Jewish man. Nathan is portrayed as the "everyman" of the strip, is fairly short, and has a goatee. Though not made explicit, it appears from context that his late partner died of complications from AIDS. He also subsequently dated Steve, who worked in the World Trade Center and was killed in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
- Soirée: a flamboyant African-American man around 30 years old. Performs as a drag queen. Soirée was thrown out of his parents' house for being gay when he was a teenager, although he later reconciled with some family members at his father's funeral. Soirée's real name is Delroy Monroe, though his real name is never used by himself or most of the other characters.
- Sky: a 22-year-old Canadian art student. Sky, the son of hippie parents, grew up on a commune. He tends toward being extremely optimistic (if slightly naive), and is cartoonishly well-built, resulting in his attracting a lot of attention from others, although he is often unaware of how attractive he is to both men and women; the gang also once walked in on Sky having sex with his friend and classmate Annie after returning from the Pride parade.
- Miss Marmelstein: Nathan's pet dog, named after a character in a Barbra Streisand's character in the Broadway play I Can Get It for You Wholesale.
- Richard: Nathan's best friend.
- Ruben: Richard's boyfriend.
- Annie: Sky's friend and classmate.
- Kelvin Cohen: a vain clothing designer; parody of Calvin Klein. He was also a former classmate of Nathan's at Hebrew School.
- Chris: Sky's boyfriend.
- Curtis: Soirée's boyfriend, a successful lawyer.
- Ricki and Lucie: a lesbian couple who live in Nathan, Soirée and Sky's apartment building. Nathan served as a sperm donor in one storyline so that the couple could have a child (named Lindsay).
- Risa: or Reese for short, Nathan's sister who recently divorced her husband. She has two sons, Jason and Justin.
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Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“The Nature of Familiar Letters, written, as it were, to the Moment, while the Heart is agitated by Hopes and Fears, on Events undecided, must plead an Excuse for the Bulk of a Collection of this Kind. Mere Facts and Characters might be comprised in a much smaller Compass: But, would they be equally interesting?”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
“My characters never die screaming in rage. They attempt to pull themselves back together and go on. And that’s basically a conservative view of life.”
—Jane Smiley (b. 1949)