Some Family Matters is set in 1970's Britain. Neil, the protagonist, is a fearful gay man, born to defeated and silent parents in a bleak rural area. Over the twenty years of the novel's span, Neil tries to assemble a family to replace the one that never worked for him. Some Family Matters tracks the evolution of gay men's personal politics as AIDS challenged the proposition that industrial-scale casual sex is liberating. Neil's struggles are shaped by the rise to power in the UK of an aggressively right-wing government and his generation's loss of faith in a caring welfare state.