About The Nimitz Affair

Coming September 25th, 2026

This story is a work of fiction inspired by the real lives of my friends who served on the USS Nimitz Aircraft Carrier, real love, and the quiet courage it takes to exist truthfully in a world that does not always make space for it.

The novel is set in the final months of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Title 10, section 654 was law from 1993 until the 20th of September 2011, and in the eighteen years it stood, more than 13,000 service members were separated under it. That is the world in which this book takes place. I have tried to be accurate about it rather than dramatic, because the accurate version is worse.

It is 2010. Lieutenant Brody Anders has been flying off the USS Nimitz for two years and has been in the Navy for fourteen. Airman Philippe Laurent is twenty-one, from Toronto by way of Rochester, and has spent his entire life making himself impossible to find, which is a skill he acquired at twelve and has never stopped practicing.

They meet in a corridor...