In Invisible Skin, the author imagines himself the former bereft lover of none other than himself, Marc Vilrouge. Unwilling to let go, he pronounces himself "the first gay Orpheus". As he turns to look back on Marc, the pain shuts down all systems, and the narrator goes into a deep freeze of the emotions. He operates at the edge of reason, having unsafe sex, resisting his way through six years of psychoanalysis with Dr. Cotton, unchanged and unaffected. A chance encounter with a former girlfriend provokes a dermatological response, the first sign of a defrosting. And then gradually, from the outside in, the narrator starts to regain an emotional footing, and with it the ability to go on living.

This is a powerful literary portrait of a man mourning another man, a grief that finds no echo in a heterosexual society, but meets its match in the most unexpected of ways.