Best of
Gay

1979

Just Above My Head


James Baldwin - 1979
    The stark grief of a brother mourning a brother opens this novel with a stunning, unforgettable experience.  Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to the church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the homosexual passion of Giovanni's Room, and to the political fire that enflames his nonfiction work.  Here, too, the story of gospel singer Arthur Hall and his family becomes both a journey into another country of the soul and senses--and a living contemporary history of black struggle in this land.

Bent


Martin Sherman - 1979
    Martin Sherman's worldwide hit play Bent took London by storm in 1979 when it was first performed by the Royal Court Theatre, with Ian McKellen as Max (a character written with the actor in mind). The play itself caused an uproar. "It educated the world," Sherman explains. "People knew about how the Third Reich treated Jews and, to some extent, gypsies and political prisoners. But very little had come out about their treatment of homosexuals." Gays were arrested and interned at work camps prior to the genocide of Jews, gypsies, and handicapped, and continued to be imprisoned even after the fall of the Third Reich and liberation of the camps. The play Bent highlights the reason why - a largely ignored German law, Paragraph 175, making homosexuality a criminal offense, which Hitler reactivated and strengthened during his rise to power.

The Catch Trap


Marion Zimmer Bradley - 1979
    But Tommy's dreams, and talent, fly higher, up in the rigging with the trapeze. When rising star Mario Santelli offers him flying lessons, it looks like the start of wonderful new life, and to Tommy's surprise, his relationship with Mario deepens even as his skill soars in the rigging. But life in the 1940s forces them to keep their love a secret, and the stress pushes both Tommy and Mario to a precipice. And as Mario flies higher and higher, Tommy begins to wonder if it will always be his role to catch Mario as he falls.A tremendously moving tale, a rich family saga, a wise and compassionate portrait of a special love in a cruel world.

Eye To Eye: Portraits of Lesbians


Joan E. Biren - 1979
    The splendid vitality captured within Eye to Eye makes this possible."

The Tale of the Five: The Sword and the Dragon


Diane Duane - 1979
    In The Door into Fire, Herewiss, Prince of the Brightwood, is the only man in centuries to possess the Power of the Flame, but he cannot control it. Even though he cannot control the Power of the Flame, he does have a talent for sorcery and with the help of Sunspark, a fire elemental, he is able to free his best friend Freelorn, the Prince of Arlen. Now Herewiss must make a choice. Does he go with his best friend to aide him in his fight to regain his kingdom or does he follow Sunspark to an ancient castle where there are 'doors' that lead to other worlds? Places that he can go to earn to use the Power of the Flame. Dare he walk through the door into fire? In The Door into Shadow, we are at a time that the royal magics are failing. The Reaver armies are massing and with them is the Shadow-destroyer off all that is good in the Goddess's creation. Between them and humanity stand a few brave souls - Herewiss, the first man in decades to have the Power of the Flame; Freelorn, the prince of Arlen; Sunspark, a fire elemental; Eftgan, the warrior queen of Darth

Tulsa Kid


Ron Padgett - 1979
    Ron Padgett was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1942. A member of the Tulsa School of Poets, he received his B.A. from Columbia College in 1964, the same year he won the Gotham Bookmart Avant-Garde Poetry Prize. He spent 1965-1966 in Paris on a Fulbright. Since 1969 he has been associated with Teachers & Writers Collaborative and numerous Poets in the Schools programs. In 1974-1976 he worked as a Writer in the Community in Lancaster, South Carolina. Since then he has directed the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York, which has been home base for him, his wife and son. His publications include "Great Balls of Fire," "Toujours l'amour," and "Triangles in the Afternoon" (poetry), "Bean Spasms," "The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Jim and Ron, " and "Antlers in the Treetops" (collaborations), as well as translations of Apollinaire, Duchamp, Cendrars and Larbaud. He is co-director of Full Court Press.

The Twyborn Affair


Patrick White - 1979
    His search for identity, self-affirmation and love takes us into the ambiguous landscapes, sexual, psychological and spiritual, of the human condition.

Now, God Be Thanked


John Masters - 1979
    Brilliantly etched and dramatically portrayed, three generations of remarkable families struggle with divided loyalties, ambition, adultery, love, and intrigue as they search for the strength to survive. It is a story bursting with the destiny of unforgettable people, an epic novel that will haunt you long after you've turned the last page.

Idleness Is the Root of All Love


Christa Reinig - 1979
    Spare, lyrical poetry by acclaimed lesbian poet

A Gay Diary: 1933-1946


Donald Vining - 1979
    Covering the years 1933-1946, Donald Vining's Diary portrays a long-vanished age and the lifestyle of a gay generation all too frequently forgotten. A touching and revealing volume documenting the surprisingly vibrant culture that existed decades before Stonewall, A Gay Diary is not to be missed by anyone interested in gay American history.

The dog : and other stories


Joseph Hansen - 1979
    

Lovers: Story of Two Men


Michael Denneny - 1979
    

Now the Volcano: Anthology of Latin American Gay Literature


Winston Leyland - 1979
    

Special Teachers/Special Boys


Peter Fisher - 1979
    

Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love


Samuel R. Delany - 1979
    Memoir. HEAVENLY BREAKFAST is Samuel R. Delaney's wise and vivid essay on urban communes and cooperatives in the winter of 'Sixty-seven/'Sixty-eight. It examines their function, structure, permanence, and impermanence as precisely as a sociological study. Because its method is narrative and anecdotal, however, it reads like a passionate memoir--a marvelous document from an extraordinary time. Based on journals he kept at the time, these pages recount his encounters with other communes and experimental living arrangements-some gentle, some brutal; of encounters between those inside and those outside the countercultural life; of idealism and hopes pushing against a resistant reality.

Cold Hands


Joseph Pintauro - 1979
    The intense relationship the two boys form shields them from their savage life. Just as their aunt Zia enters their life and begins to show them the world as it can be, Cello is sent to school in Europe. He studies for the priesthood, but begins to question his faith. Two weeks before his ordination he returns home to ponder that final step. He seeks out Tato, fresh from a failed marriage. Cello decides against the priesthood. Their sexuality threatens to explode, and Cello flees. In an auto accident, Cello's suffers a strange, repression of identity. He marries, raises a family, and settles into an unhappy life. Ten years after later, they meet again, unleashing an whirlpool of remembrance and a final dramatic resolution.

A Lover's Cock and Other Gay Poems


Arthur Rimbaud - 1979
    

Tiger Beat


Dennis Cooper - 1979
    In the carefully-shaped yet authentic language of teen boys, and in sympathy with their points of view on all concerns from sexuality (straight and gay) to rock music to death by cancer, these are poem-videos of the real and fantasized lives of wholly believable teenagers--rendered brilliantly in poetry.

Our Right to Love


Vida Publishers - 1979
    

Our Share of Time


Yves Navarre - 1979
    You don't expect anything anymore. You lose your head for just a second and someone walks into your life, turns it upside down, tenderly, brutally, making a place for himself. Even before anything has happened it's already too late. You can't tell who is choosing whom, when, how, why. You only know these things later when everything is over and each person holds the other accountable for what has gone on. These opening lines from Our Share of Time begin a story concerned with the impossibility of sustaining love, or even understanding how and why it started. In this diarylike reminiscence, Pierre Forgue, a Parisian school teacher, offers us an apologia for his past and present life as well as a bleak picture of his future. Moving between his Paris apartment and his summer cottage in Peyroc, he vacillates between love and indifference, between Duck (the young man who casually enters his life and who callously departs) and the rest of the world, between lost youth and approaching middle age.His is the universal midlife crisis accentuated by the presence of Duck, the now-you-see-him-now-you-don't young and handsome intruder who brings both happiness and misery. This novel, about the difficulty of maintaining lasting relationships, succeeds by the painstaking honesty with which Yves Navarre records events whose ending is happy, painful, and sweet.

Puppies


John Valentine - 1979
    A decaying building housed its seedy premises, and short of anywhere else to live, he made his home in the rear office. "Peeling wallpaper. Broken windows. Unlockable locks. Bad plumbing. Most slumlike quarters I've ever had. In the absence of any kind of curtaining, I had newspaper taped over the windows. The building was the streetkids' social and community center. Anyone looking for a crashpad looked first there... it was sexual paradise."

The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period


Michael Goodich - 1979
    Also suggests that despite the severe penalties which ensued, exceptions were made to the rule, notably among royalty, and that "illicit and nonprocreative practices" contrary to theological dogma frequently occured. Highly readable, documented and supported by a wealth of previously unknown source material.